Converting America

by Leslie J Sacks
February 3, 2010

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/478/converting-america

We are now increasingly insisting, in this somewhat United States of America, on treating everyone and every regime in the world as we would have them treat us. For a country at pains to further separate church and state, to banish the Ten Commandments from its public areas, this flirtation with a belief that is at the very core of Judeo-Christian tradition is more than fascinating. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with our State Department and White House on their respective couches.

This approach, apart from any hypocrisy, borders on fantastical irresponsibility, naïve unreality and gross self-deception, denying as it does the most concrete lessons of our history and culture. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Eli Wiesel – and the vast majority of our novelists and historians dealing with the human condition – would almost certainly agree.

The world is in fact a dangerous place, inhabited by fundamentalist regimes, crusading radicals, and amoral power seekers. Realism would dictate that we be pessimists and cynics, never trusting until verified, basing our foreign policy on the past actions of our opponents and not on their sweet words or our even sweeter hopes. Instead, we are (almost compulsively) pursuing a positive, optimistic, almost child-like Alice in Wonderland approach to the world.

Ahmadenijad does his best to persuade neighboring Arab and the world at large just how racist and genocidal he is, applying his country's primary (and increasingly solitary) resources to building nuclear hegemony and terroristic leverage at the expense of his people's advancement. Yet we insist on believing his repeated and verified lies, in imagining there is reason where there is not, negotiability where goals are immutable.

We imagine that gifts, accommodation and understanding will mollify North Korea's maniacal Kim Jong Il, that if we facilitate his "civilian" nuclear program his military ambitions in that area will evaporate. As a result, we have a rogue North Korea not only possessing nuclear weapons, but exporting that technology as well. Time is on their side – yet that is what we insist on giving them.

We bend over backwards to endow chairs of Islamic Culture at our universities, allow Saudi imams to build mosques that crisscross our country (and our prisons) – yet we will not demand a single church in Saudi Arabia, never mind the right to carry a Bible in that land. We refuse to require the outlawing of honor killings and clitorectomies (female circumcisions) amongst our so-called friends in the Middle East. We push for nuclear disarmament and increased civil, legal and human rights here in the USA, effectively gutting our ability to successfully ensure our security. At the same time, our enemies keep their walls high, their freedoms low and their nuclear and military ambitions on steroids.

Such is our current predicament. But a mature, conservative realism does not derive from a psychologically over-compensating agenda, but is rather based on 4000 years of history of Man and his cruel and avaricious passions. That realism, born of behavior and not imagination, dictates generosity aside, that we treat the political world as they treat us, no more, no less.

It dictates that we treat friends as friends, or better. But it also requires us to treat those who wish us ill with suspiciousness and caution. It necessitates too that when people or regimes take up arms against us and our innocents that we give them no quarter, that we show the same level of mercy they show us. When they behead our journalists, we should not worry about using white gloves to handle their holy books – when they throw acid in the faces of their own women, we need not bring them to America to enjoy the limitless patience of our justice system. And certainly those who plot our demise with chemicals, biological and nuclear weapons – those savages deserve our most accurate cruise missiles and not our futile proselytizing to convert them to Christ's vision, to turning the other cheek. Christ may approve of our emperor's new clothes, but I doubt our White House is desirous of such a loud appellation.

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