Some friends invited me to their Passover seder the other night, and for the first time I really paid attention to the meaning of the words. As you know, the seder celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew people -- the Jews -- from oppression and slavery in Egypt around the first millennium BCE. There has long been debate about the accuracy of that history, but skip that for now.
Ask yourself why liberation from slavery has dominated Jewish and later Christian thought for three thousand years? Jesus' Last Supper was a seder ceremony. Black churches used the Egyptian slavery of the children of Israel as a model for their own experiences of slavery and liberation. So have other liberation movements, including the Abolitionists and the American founders.
The Jewish flight from Egyptian slavery was a model of human liberation in the West, until Karl Marx twisted liberty into tyranny. But the struggle between freedom and control freaks is universal. It can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the family hell created by kids during teenage rebellion. Freedom is a basic yearning of the human spirit, and so is control freakery.
Now we have a president who confuses slavery and liberty, most obviously in the case of the Islamist Spring, which is certainly not an Arab Spring, since in Syria alone nearly 100,000 Arabs have killed each other by now. Some Spring!
To make the results clear beyond question, the Morsi regime in Egypt has just imposed a Sharia constitution that drops the provision against slavery. The reason for that is Islamic law: the Quran describes Mohammed raiding caravans and small towns to steal slaves, including his child bride. The Islamist world still applies slavery to wives and daughters. Thomas Jefferson tried to stop Libyan slave raiding of American merchant ships off the shores of Tripoli, but they never quite got the point.
In Islam it is not freedom but complete submission that is emphasized. Islam is radically different from Judaism and Christianity. It is a desert nomad religion. It reflects that culture.
Domestically, Obama is trying to create a Eurosocialist centralized economy. But in the liberal paradise of Europe the socialist model is failing right in front of our eyes today. Millions of people in Italy and Greece have had their incomes slashed in half and their taxes increased. The Euro is failing in all the weaker economies of Europe. The standard demagogic propaganda of Eurosocialism -- calling one's opponents racists and planetary poisoners -- is failing. In a few years the Arab-Iranian oil monopoly will crumble, when shale gas takes over its market share. Countries around the world are frantically searching for shale now that it can be converted into clean hydrocarbons. That will eliminate Islamist OPEC control of oil and allow freedom to emerge again.
Everywhere the Arab Spring has sprung, Islamist tyranny has replaced relative freedom -- for women most of all. Turkey used to be a modern country until the Islamofascists took over. Egypt used to be relatively tolerant, and kept the 30-year peace treaty with Israel, until Obama told Mubarak to resign. Wherever the Muslim world was poised between modernism and tradition, now the reactionary patriarchs are in control of hundreds of millions of people. Behind a solid wall of media censorship, women are being abused, intimidated, and beaten, with the official approval of imams and mullahs. Read the books of Ayaan Hirsi Ali if you have any doubts about that. Our feminists are playing deaf, but they know, they know. Under Obama the feminist movement has colluded in the enslavement of Muslim women in the "Arab Spring." (Just consider Naomi Wolf's new job with Al Jazeera.)
Pre-Obama, there were genuine movements towards modernity in the Muslim world, beginning with Turkey in 1922. Post-Obama, half a billion women are likely to be openly abused if they venture outside of the house without a male escort, much more vulnerable to blame for being sexually abused by the "justice" of Shariah law, and much more oppressed by the last nasty patriarchy in the world. Thank you, Liberator Obama.
Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln would never, ever have gone along with the renewed fascist control of the Muslim world.
At the UN, 57 Muslim member regimes routinely smear and slander Israel and America, with European and American acquiescence. Brain-locked liberals around the world think this is all fine, and Obama the Messiah is beyond criticism.
Obama is all in favor of the Islamist Spring, because, whether he is Muslim or not, he is an Islamist sympathizer. There is no reasonable doubt anymore.
This is the worst news about an American president since the rise of Stalin, who also penetrated the U.S. with his agents.
My question is whether it will spell an end to the America we have known.
I think America will survive and ultimately win.
The reason is that control freaks are always self-deluded. Freedom is a yearning of the human spirit in America, but it is not limited to America.
No control freak in the world can really run a giant national economy, much less the world as a whole. People have tried to do such things for thousands of years. In general, centralized control fails, just as the Soviet command economy failed.
What about ObamaCare? Nationalized medicine will elect a lot of Democrats. Ordinary people will learn to get around the inevitable medical rationing, the way they do in Europe. We will all become Italians. Medical vacations abroad will offer an increasingly attractive alternative to American socialized medicine. Private medical care is always being tried in Europe, and some of it works very well. Now it will become global, with private medicine competing with nationalized bureaucracy. Mexico is already becoming a medical travel destination, with international approval for some of its medical centers.
Even in the face of Obamanism, the high-tech revolution is increasingly hard to control. Lenin placed all his technological control bets on electrification of the Soviet Union. When a new industrial revolution commenced with the appearance of cheap computers, the Soviets could never keep up.
When shale technology (invented in America) begins to work in Poland, the Eastern Med, China, and Ireland, the Greens will suddenly decide that natural gas is good for us. Their favorite control whip won't work anymore.The biotech revolution is exploding, along with space travel, web talk, and a hundred other new and hard-to-control inventions.
Even today the stock market is rising, a leading indicator of growth. The market is already discounting the expected effects of ObamaCare.
Will it work? Not forever. But it will continue the long, long struggle between control freaks and regular people. Just think Soda Jerk Bloomberg in New York, who has now decided to control restaurant portion sizes in the city. Will that work? Of course not.
So -- will American freedom survive Obama?
I think so, yes. But the country will look very different when the uproar dies down.
Conservatives should think globally, and mobilize the forces of freedom around the world. They exist. Every time an impoverished African buys a cellphone the global free market expands. We must find freedom-loving peoples, make strong alliances, and resist the control freaks, who also exist around the world.
The Cold War was won by a Western alliance that finally won the sympathies of regular people in the Soviet Empire. The Evil Empire crumbled from within. All it took was a unified front by the West combined with its own internal protest movement.
The Long Jihad war can be won the same way. With instant globalization there is no other way. This is an ideological war, and free peoples have won such struggles before.
As for American conservatives, we should heed Winston Churchill, who saw very bad times indeed:
"Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
No comments:
Post a Comment