The Other McCain

Caroline Franz (left) shown amid a mob of Cairo protesters

“We were then assaulted by a crowd of men. I was beaten by a group of youngsters and adults who tore my clothes. . . [I was molested in a way that] would be considered rape. . . Some people tried to help me but failed. I was lynched. It lasted three quarters of an hour before I was taken out. I thought I was going to die.”
— Caroline Sinz, French TV reporter, describing how she was assaulted while covering protests in Cairo

“When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. . . . I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. . . . The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Some people become so obsessed by intellectual abstractions — “liberty,” “equality,” “social justice,” “human rights,” etc. — that they can ignore or accept even the most catastrophic consequences of their good intentions. For too many people, ideas are like idols, to be worshipped without doubt, no matter how many corpses are piled up at the bloody altars of their fanatical cults.

“Democracy” is one such intellectual idol, and imposing this idea on the rest of the world has become a bipartisan pursuit of our political establishment, an idée fixe exercising such a dominant influence over our foreign policy that no matter how many wild-goose chases we make, or how often the will-o’-th’-wisp eludes our frantic grasp, we never tire of the effort. So it was that I thought of Burke’s sober caution when I saw Donald Douglas’s post “Sharia Revolution in Egypt,” with this video:

Democracy is, as Burke would say, “a strong principle” and we ought to observe the effects of democracy in Egypt before we risk offering congratulations to the Egyptians. The effects observed so far don’t exactly inspire confidence that the Egyptians have really received a blessing, and recent headlines are troubling:

Muslim medical students boycotting lectures
on evolution… because it ‘clashes with the Koran’
— Daily Mail

Arab League Approves Sanctions Against Syria
— New York Times

Suspected Islamists bomb police station, bank in Nigeria
— Agence France Presse

Taliban paid £100 a month to stop fighting
— Telegraph

Fond hopes about the “Arab Spring” seem likely to be as ill-founded as were the similar hopes of “Recovery Summer.”