No more guilt

Patrick over at Born Again Redneck identifies our worst enemy in this way:

It's the "useful idiots:" the Cindy Sheepfaces, the Peace Moonbeams, the Ward Churchills, the Hollywood halfwits, the idiotic students wasting their parents' money studying treehugging and the "Vagina Monologues" at expensive universities across the nation.

Because we are a liberal (in the old-fashioned way - meaning tolerant, easy-going and live-and-let-live) society, we have let these certifiable lunatics and morons get away with their idiocy for too long. We have let them browbeat us with their guilt-inducing emotionally manipulative words like racism, chauvinism and sexism for too long.

We've let them introduce moral and cultural equivalency into ordinary everyday dialogue to the point where it is almost impossible to have a decent conversation without having to accept and react to their mind-bending language, their dishonest and hypocritical rules, their immaturity, insanity and general mental malaise.

I agree. The Soviet Union had a term for the "useful idiots", it was gavnoi, which means "shit eater". It was used by everybody. If a delegation from the Soviet/American Friendship Society, or a nuclear freeze group or a “friends of the UN” organization was coming to the Soviet Embassy in Washington for a banquet the Soviet Ambassador would say to the head chef, "prepare a meal for 30 people tonight some shit eaters are coming here for dinner".

The Russians knew exactly who, and what, they were dealing with.

Patrick’s point tracks very closely to that raised by Shelby Steele in the Opinion Journal. Mr. Steele identifies the source of the Left’s power to resist any positive action by the West in general and the US in particular in White Guilt. Because the White West was at one time imperialistic and exploitative of non-White peoples and because we have undergone a moral transformation in which we now realize that colonialism and slavery were wrong, we now flee in panic at the mere suggestion that we are backsliding into the sins of the past.

Mr. Steele says that our failure to bring the entire weight of our military power against foes from the North Vietnamese to the Iraqi insurgency is a symptom of this attitude. He is most likely correct.

What are we to do? The first thing we need to do is to stop letting labels frighten us. If someone who wants Black people to stop living as wards of the state in broken, dysfunctional families, mired in crime and drug addiction is a racist then lets wear the label proudly. If believing that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam and his evil offspring running their country makes me an imperialist then I’m an imperialist. What’s more the world could use more imperialists.

The next thing we need to do is rediscover and embrace our history. The fact is that even our mistakes usually have positive results in the long term. Black people in America today are better off than their cousins back in Africa. As Mohammad Ali said after visiting Africa for the first time, “thank God granddad got on that boat”.

India is better off for being a British colony. Once they got over the national fit of pique that led them into the Soviet orbit and discovered Western capitalism they became one of the strongest and fastest growing economies in the world.

Would the average American Indian truly want to go back and live as an upper Paleolithic hunter gatherer or subsistence farmer in a world without vaccinations or antibiotics?

If the Muslim trash rioting in France hates it so much there why don’t they return to North Africa? Could it be that they find life even in the welfare ghettos outside Paris more pleasant than life back home?

Would not the Cuban people be better off today if the US had taken Cuba as a territory after the Spanish American war? Let’s see. . . starvation and oppression on the one hand or an air conditioned condo in the fifty-first state on the other. That’s a hard one.

Ask any reasonably attractive 12 year-old girl in Iraq if she is sorry that Uday Hussein’s rape room is closed for business.

The West and the US especially have done vast amounts of good for the entire globe. Ask anyone who is old enough to remember smallpox if he would like to see it return.

Yes we have done wrong. However slavery was normal across the entire globe until the Christian West decided that its time was over and enforced that decision, first on itself then on others. It is no accident that the only place on the planet where slavery is being practiced is in the non-White, non-Christian Third World.

We must once again learn to be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. Capitalism is not perfect. It does allow for losers as well as winners, but no other system puts as much wealth in as many hands and allows as much upward mobility.

Democracy is messy and inefficient and sometimes makes you pull your hair out, but no one has come up with anything better. I could keep going down the list but you get the

The United States has contributed more to the world than any other nation in history and we have much more to give. It is time to shake off the chains of a useless and undeserved guilt and get on with the job.