The View From 1776

Commenting on Mr. Slater Bakhtavar’s essay, Mr. James Veverka states, “Nonsense. Carter was a fool regarding several things but the primary cause of the deep problems of the middle east is the effects of colonialism and the partitions after WW1.”

Mr. Veverka neglects to state that this is merely another way of laying the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of liberalism. 

Before World War I, most of the Middle East was controlled by the Islamic Ottoman Empire, not by Western colonial powers.

He also neglects to state that the partition of the old Ottoman Empire after World War I was largely at the impetus of President Woodrow Wilson, an iconic liberal-Progressive, along with Georges Clemenceau, the leader of socialist France. 

This partitioning was a typical liberal-Progressive-socialist project, a conception of the liberal mind that believes abstract reason, in an ivory-tower vacuum, is always superior to the wisdom of past ages.  Liberal policy wonks, from Wilson to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have always been cockily confident that they have special knowledge and abilities that can transform human societies into perfection.  Liberals specialize in seeing all that is wrong with political societies and prescribing radical surgery that leaves the patient uncured, but permanently crippled.

In the case of the Middle East, we had an early example of the political destructiveness that today is taught as multiculturalism.  The false and corrosive idea is that social, ethnic, and economic groups, not individuals, are the proper units of government. 

Rejected is the original foundation of our Constitution upon individual citizens, the conception that every individual is created equal before the law and that the task of our educational and political institutions is to integrate all immigrant cultures into ours, persuading them that our original constitutionalism affords history’s greatest personal freedom and individual prosperity.

For more than 5,000 years the Middle Eastern peoples had been ruled by one empire after another, always by autocratic, if not despotic, Pharaohs, kings, and sultans.  Never in history had those peoples experienced self-government. 

Undeterred by this, and heeding arch-liberal John Dewey’s dictum that history is not a proper subject for progressive school curricula, liberal-Progressive-socialists split the Middle East into a hodgepodge of protectorates administered by France, England, et al., creating artificial “nations” that existed only on maps.  The cause du jour was “self-determination,” which in the Middle East was an overture to anarchic tribal warfare.

In the same way, today’s liberal-Progressive-socialists, both on the Republican and the Democratic sides, believe that splitting our nation into warring cultural camps, using the tools of multiculturalism and affirmative action, is more desirable than educating our youth to revere the Constitution and the individual liberties of life, private property, and political action.

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