Myopic Folly On A Grand Scale

Sweden: An Example of How Not to Handle Immigration

We’ve taken in far too many people and we’re letting them down badly – especially the children

Tove Lifvendahl
The Spectator


 

For a British boy to be killed by a grenade attack anywhere is appalling, but for it to happen in a suburb of Gothenburg should shatter a few illusions about Sweden. Last week’s murder of eight-year-old Yuusuf Warsame fits a pattern that Swedes have come slowly to recognise over the years. He was from Birmingham, visiting relatives, and was caught up in what Swedish police believe is a gang war within the Somali community. Last year, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car bomb outside Gothenburg, another apparent victim of gang violence.

For years, Sweden has regarded itself as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ — making its mark on the world not by fighting wars but by offering shelter to war’s victims. Refugees have arrived here in extraordinary numbers. Over the past 15 years, some 650,000 asylum-seekers made their way to Sweden. Of the 163,000 who arrived last year, 32,000 were granted asylum. Sweden accepts more refugees in proportion to size of population than any other nation in the developed world — when it comes to offering shelter, no one does it better. But when it comes to integrating those we take in (or finding the extra housing, schools and healthcare needed for them), we don’t do so well.

It may be news to the rest of the world, but gang warfare has been a feature of our country for years now.

Another Fundamental Human Right Is Discovered

The New Transnational Man

The brouhaha over US immigration policy changes has produced some interesting developments.  For some time now it has been touted about that visa free travel between nations is a tangible benefit of globalisation.  The promise of a united, nation-less human race seemed to be coming one step closer.  It was both boon and benefit.

Then, before you could say "Brer Rabbit"  visa free travel suddenly transformed into a fundamental human right.  You can tell that this mindshift has occurred because folk all around the world (we are told) are protesting passionately against the recent US immigration and visitor restrictions as a violation of fundamental human rights.  Why else would the dear folk of Swaziland be otherwise protesting a change in another country's immigration policy?  Why else would the Left in New Zealand be stamping its collective foot, demanding that the Prime Minister protest more vehemently and forthrightly?  How did such a fundamental mindset shift come about?

Back when Noah was a lad, were a nation peremptorily to tighten up its visa requirements, the standard form was for other (objecting) nations to make quiet diplomatic representations via the normal channels.  No longer.  Now it's "Man the Barricades" time.

We have recently travelled to a country which required a formal visa to be issued.

Embarrassing Exposure

Globalism Takes a Hit

One of the great idols of the age has come under attack.  The buzzy bees in the hive are angrily swarming.  It has somehow come to pass that the Commentariat and its attendant Chattering Class have come to believe something quite strange.  It is now received wisdom that when a democratic nation elects a leader, somehow that leader's primary obligation and responsibility, once elected, is not to the voting citizens, but to globalized humanity.  This is a recent, radical view, which fundamentally changes the concept of the nation state.  It also profoundly changes the principles and tenets of democracy.  It has become one of the great ideological heresies of the age.

This strange ideology has been brought into sharp relief with the election of Jehu II in the United States.  That country has been in a quandary--not unique to itself--in which its citizens have suffered violence, attack, and murder at the hands of foreign nationals engaging in jihad against the United States.  One would have thought it is a fundamental duty of a sovereign state to serve and protect its citizens.  Even a child would understand that it is the duty of the elected government to protect the people from such violent evils.

But something strange happened on the way to the forum.  Now it seems, our elites have adopted an entirely foreign notion: when someone is elected to lead a nation, immediately upon election his or her primary responsibility becomes to mankind in the abstract, not to the voting citizens nor to the nation state to which they belong.  They call this exotic names like globalism, or global citizenry, or humanitarianism, or progressivism.  This is one of the most radical ideological changes in the history of mankind--but it is a change which is not "of the people" or "by the people" or "for the people".  It is a radical change fomented by self-styled superior humans, intellectuals, enlightened folk--that is, by those who believe they are our betters and can assume the status of the gods.

Nowhere has this radical change been more clearly illustrated than in the United States.

The Subornation of World Vision

A Sad, But Salutary Lesson

We long ago stopped supporting the Christian aid organisation, World Vision.  That is not to say that at that time we reached the view that the organisation was corrupt or that its aid projects were counter-productive.  Rather, we were uncomfortable with World Vision's increasing reliance upon secular state governments and the UN for its work--both in the sense of relying upon them as a key source for funds and being willing to work within their moral universe.  

World Vision, by turning to the pagans for funding and support, would eventually become dependant upon them, if not compromised in their commitment to the Christian gospel.  There were plenty of other, more consistent Christian organisations worthy of support.  The best Christian charity is face-to-face work, person-to-person, village-by-village.  The best Christian charitable work is rarely in a hurry, believing that suffering has been intrinsic to the human condition ever since the Fall.  The best Christian charitable work honours Christ and walks after Him, not instead of Him.

Now it has emerged that funds from World Vision have been siphoned off by one of its senior employees and funnelled to aid and abet Hamas, a blood thirsty Islamic pseudo-state.

Theatre of the Absurd

Idleness is the Devil's Workshop

One of the strangest phenomena to emerge in our generation is the vast overreach of national governments to the point of believing they can police the whole world.  A pick pocket relieves a tourist of his wallet in Rio.  The British police issue a warrant for his arrest, and gets geared up to prosecute the perp, should they ever get their hands on him.  The British metropolitan police have become gendarmes of the world, for the world, and over the world.  

How have such bizarre beliefs and actions come about?  They are an expression of global Humanitarianism, an ideology which holds that all mankind are under the same law and accountable to it.  Alleged war criminals in Bosnia or Africa, once arrested, are hauled off to the Hague to be tried.  These overreaching claims of law and justice surely undermine the concept of sovereign nation states.  They also assert an implied doctrine, a suppressed premise--namely, that there is one law that governs all men, cultures, nations and to which all men are subject.

In a more Christian era, such a claim of universal law would have been instantly recognised as a reference to the law of Almighty God, the Ten Commandments.  But in our secular world, God has been replaced by Man, in semi-divinised form.  There is a universal law, and universal jurisprudence and it is the Law of Man.  The British police are servants apparently, not of the citizens of Great Britain, but of global Humanitarianism.  

Consequently it strikes us as bizarre that the British metropolitan police are summoning an Israeli politician for questioning on suspicion of war crimes.

Will Europe See It Through?

First Steps

It looks as if Europe has taken some significant steps to seal its border from the endless progression of economic migrants making their way to Europe.  It remains to be seen how effective its policing will be of the boats and the vehicular and foot traffic.  

The immediate focus is upon migrants boating up and crossing from Turkey to Greek islands near to Turkey, at which point the migrants land de facto in Europe.  The new policy is stated as follows:

From Sunday morning, any asylum seeker who lands on the holiday islands including Kos, Lesbos and Chios with no longer be able to catch ferries to Athens, but will be swiftly interviewed by asylum officials or judges at new detention camps.

From April 4, once Greek law has begun, deportations to Turkey will begin with leaders hoping within weeks that the process will take no more than days.  Those that appeal their removal will be brought before Greek judges in rapid-fire court hearings, under an operation costing €20 million a month involving 4,000 staff.  [The Telegraph]

We predict that the flow of migrants via Turkey to Europe via Greek islands will cease, rapidly.  It remains to be seen whether the flow from North Africa across the Med, or the vehicle and foot traffic from Eastern Europe will be similarly interdicted.  To date, lax and easy European policy has created the migrant crisis, proving a beacon and magnet for those wanting to better their lives (which is the case for most people on earth).

Only when the borders are shut to volitional migrants can a sustainable genuine refugee programme be put in place and developed.  As one commentator put it, Europe has finally decided to adopt the Australian solution.  Anything less swamps and drowns a genuine refugee programme with a flood of economic migrants.

Yet it is still an open question as to whether Europe has sufficient commitment to such a policy to see it carried out fairly and justly.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Suicide of the West

By Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Suicidal ennui: when the best lack all conviction, and are therefore no match for the invading hordes of those who are full of passionate intensity. “What’s that tiresome noise at the gates? Somebody send Sadie to go see.”

The massacre in Paris has brought two things, already obvious, into high relief once again. We are observing, in slow motion, a collision between two very diseased cultures. The diseases are quite different but seem, in some respects, to be made for each other. One disease is listless and the other aggressive. One has no organizing principle, no arche, and the other has the wrong organizing principle. One is idolatrous and polytheistic and the other is idolatrous and monotheistic. One believes that no gods should be honored in the public square while the other believes that only one should be, but that is a false one. One used to be Christian, and must become Christian again, while the other must become Christian.

Our sympathies and prayers are obviously for France in this, but those sympathies operate on two levels.

Humanitarianism Found Wanting

Crumbling Mortar

The tide of migrants pushing their way into Europe and demanding welcome, provision, support and acceptance has European nations reeling.  Europe resembles the proverbial deer caught in the headlights.  Every policy position, every action and reaction faces a storm of criticism amongst the elites, on the one hand, and the public, on the other.

Why the confusion?  Why the paralysis?  Germany has become the poster-boy for the Western response. Led by Angela Merkel, it has championed the philosophy of humanitarianism.  She has spoken of "European values", by which she means humanitarianism, and the greatest moral obligation which Germany has ever faced.  She has sought to lead the country in responding with unconditional charity towards those who alight upon European shores.  Even more, she had demanded that other European nations "do their bit" and follow German commitment.

Meanwhile, the public grows uneasy as they hear stories of violence, muggings, rapes, beatings, and extortion amongst the immigrants.  They hear the arrogant demands.  The insistence that countries like Germany must provide for them.  The public grows uneasy at the "foreignness" of the migrants.

Ironically, if you fronted up to Germany's borders and demanded we be allowed to immigrate because our standard of living was sub-par and Germany's was much better we would be quickly shown the door.

A Paean to Humanitarianism

A Diabolical Joke

Australian columnist, Tim Blair writes in The Telegraph:

The UN recently decided that Israel was the number one violator of women’s rights in the world today. And then the UN appointed the Islamic Republic of Iran to the executive board of the UN’s Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.

UPDATE. Anne Bayefsky in 2008:

What we are seeing now is that universal human rights are being undercut by the very organisation that was created to protect them.
It can’t stop genocide in Sudan, it’s can’t stop the butchery that’s going on in Zimbabwe or get Aung San Suu Kyi out of Myanmar. And civilisation is threatened, we can’t be sanguine about it, we can’t sit around waiting and hoping that one day the UN will get it right.

Seven years on, the UN is making things worse.

The United Nations sits as a bloated Shelob upon  the shores of Turtle Bay, sucking the lifeblood out of humanity.

Wrong to Sit Upon a Chair

Evolutionary, Because Its Stupid

Over one hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton saw plainly the connection between humanitarianism and human-hating Greenism (although Greenism did not exist formally as a cause back then).  He wrote:

We constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians; I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity. . . . I am here only following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants.

I think it is wrong to sit on a man.  Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.  Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.  That is the drive of the argument.  And for this argument it can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress.  A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might--one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children.  This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.  [G. K. Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 316.]

And so it has come to be that the modern Greenist is profoundly anti-human and pro-crustacean.

Perpetual War

The Injustice of Even Contemplating War in Syria

As the war drums beat over Syria the controversy about casus belli rises again.  What are the just causes for going to war?  In the Western tradition what constitutes a just cause for war has become inflated significantly in the past two hundred years.  We see the fruits of that inflation in the debates swirling in the United States at present over Syria. 

The notion of a just war is rooted in Christian doctrine and in the first Christendom.  Whilst the idea of a just war is inherently right, the details can be diabolical.  Who or what determines what is just?  When you have medieval and post-medieval rulers fixated upon their own vanities the concept of justice can be stretched to cover a mountain of vainglory.  Any insult to the Sun-King of the day becomes intolerable; to punish the malefactors becomes cast as an act of retributive justice.  Therefore, to be genuinely so, the doctrine of a just war must be grounded in a higher law which defines wherein justice actually lies, not in the vanity of vainglorious rulers or nations. 

The situation got noticeably worse during the time of doctrines of the divine right of kings.

Coruscating Memories

The Rotten Fruit of Humanitarian Wars

It has become fashionable amongst the Commentariate in the West to speak of a new, enlightened apologia for war. The wars of our future, Tony Blair pretentiously pontificated, would be wars based on "our values". They would not be for grimy things like money, or territory, or national pride, or oil but would be humanitarian wars--taking up the sword to defend the human (aka Western) rights of the downtrodden around the globe. The glorious wars of the future would be those which were not in defence of any national interest. In fact, wars fought over national interests were, by Blair's definition, evil--selfish and self-seeking. Wars fought to defend the underdogs of the globe were to be noble and glorious--and not wars at all--at least not as we once knew them.

One of the reasons the UK (and Europe generally) became so disenchanted so quickly over Tony Blair's dalliance in Iraq was the rapidly growing conviction that the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein had little to do with a war over "our values" and much more to do with oil. In other words, it was an unjustifiable war, on Blair's own term. He became reviled amongst the members of the Commentariate for his hypocrisy. But the seductive attraction of Blair's "vision" lived on.

Fast forward to Libya. Here, at last, would be a noble war fought for no national interests whatsoever--only for the love of one's fellow man, defending him against a bumptious tyrant. Alas, such wars are not new. They have been fought before in the past. The outcomes have been disastrous.

Novelist James Warner illustrates by referring us to the Russian war against Turkey in the 1870, as viewed through the eyes of (Blairite) Dostoevsky and (increasingly pacifist) Tolstoy. Warning: both were professing Christians.The money quotation comes from Solzhenitsyn at the end of the piece.

The Road to Hell

Paved With Good Intentions

Have liberal intellectuals learned nothing from Iraq?

David Rieff
March 23, 2011 | 12:00 am
Excerpted from The New Republic

Had the purpose of an air exclusion zone over Libya been solely to protect the people of Benghazi and of other insurgent-controlled areas in the east from being massacred by Colonel Qaddafi’s advancing forces, opposing it might still have made intellectual sense, but it would not have made moral sense, which is what should count most.

Qaddafi had promised a slaughter in the evening before the United Nations authorized the Western intervention, and there was no sane reason not to take him at his word. . . .

But from the beginning it has been clear that while this intervention has been couched in the language of humanitarianism and of the global good deed, invoking the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the U.N.’s new doctrine that is supposed to govern those instances when outside powers must step in militarily to prevent tyrants from killing their own people, the more important goal has been to support the insurgency, which is to say, to bring about regime change. Had it been otherwise, the bombing could have been halted once the Libyan government attack on Benghazi had been halted. Instead, it goes on, with various French, British, and American politicians and military officials at odds mainly about how much (not whether) the bombing campaign should be widened, and whether Colonel Qaddafi is himself a legitimate target for assassination from the air.

So much for the hope that Iraq and Afghanistan might actually have taught the West anything lasting about trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun. Instead, it is as if Iraq, which, in the United States, was initially welcomed by most liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike as a war of liberation, had never happened, and, instead, we have traveled backward in time. Remember those halcyon days of the late 1990s when Tony Blair was promising the world that in the future the West would fight wars in the name of its values, not just of its interests, in effect promising that the wars of the twenty-first century would be noble wars of altruism? If you don’t, well, don’t worry: If the war in Libya is any indication, you’ll have the chance to live them all over again.. . .

It is tempting to say that what is taking place here is some sort of Freudian “return of the repressed.” But in reality, the infatuation of liberal elites in the West with humanitarian war was barely shaken by Iraq. Many of the same activists who either opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, or soon recanted their support for it, campaigned ardently for a military intervention in Darfur. . . . Two of the most prominent among those who called for Western military action in Darfur played crucial roles in persuading their respective governments to start bombing in Libya. Grotesque as it may sound, though he held no government appointment, Bernard-Henri Levy played a greater role in France’s decision to spearhead the bombing campaign, which involved at least one instance of French aircraft flying close air support for a rebel column, than did the foreign minister, Alain Juppe. Samantha Power, whose book, A Problem From Hell, about the failure of the United States to prevent or halt genocide in the twentieth century, has been the touchstone for American liberal interventionists since its publication (it was a favorite of the late Richard Holbrooke), is in government, where, to give her her due, she will finally be in position to help put these ideas into practice.

This war—let us call it by its right name, for once—will be remembered to a considerable extent as a war made by intellectuals, and cheered on by intellectuals. The main difference this time is that, particularly in the United States, these intellectuals largely come from the liberal rather than the conservative side. . . .

But in humanitarian war, which its supporters nonetheless continue self-servingly to refuse to think of as being war, that is, as something that invariably involves the slaughter of innocents even when this slaughter takes place in a just cause (and for all the talk of “smart” weapons, war from the air is particularly prone to kill civilians), the moral good intentions of those who would wage it is somehow thought to trump all other considerations. Again, this war is no longer about protecting the people of Benghazi, if it ever was. That goal was accomplished on the first day and NATO planes could have continued to protect it as they did in Kurdistan between the end of the First Gulf War in 1991 and the beginning of the Second in 2003. Rather, it is about overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi and installing the insurgent leadership in Benghazi in his place.

Why Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, or David Cameron feel that who rules Libya is any of their affair, and why they were more intent on securing the (grudging) assent of the Arab League than the assent of their own legislatures, shows just how misguided the doctrine of humanitarian intervention really is. These leaders are more intent on imposing democracy by force than in honoring the democratic judgment of their parliaments at home. As a result, what we are left with is the angelic Caesarism of the “empire of the good”!

And all with the nihil obstat of an intellectual class whose good intentions are not the solution to Power’s “problem from hell,” but rather the problem itself. Humanitarian savagery from 15,000 feet or from a missile-bearing submarine is still savagery. And the road to hell is still paved with good intentions.

David Rieff is a contributing editor for The New Republic.

The Hundred Years War

Humanitarianism and Its Wars

Simon Schama's doco on Henry VIII played recently on Sky. He traced the gradual descent of Henry's reign into the murderous and tyrannical. The Divine Right of Kings (or, of governments in general) has always been a pernicious doctrine; it necessarily spawns great evil. Henry was no exception.

Human rights doctrines are equally pernicious and tyrannical. It is not an exaggeration, nor is it drawing a particularly long bow, to argue that Human Rights doctrines have produced the fifty years war of the United States and the West (and counting). Now, of course, Henry and his ilk had a justification for capriciously executing all and sundry who crossed them. The Divine Right of Kings asserted that the king was the avatar of God and therefore carried absolute authority. To resist the king was to impugn the dignity and being of God Himself. All resistance to Henry was implicit blasphemy.

Human Rights doctrines assert that Man is the ultimate and highest being--at least in their modern secular form. It is apt to name this approach the doctrine of humanitarianism--that is, the ultimacy of humanity. Man's glory and honour must not only be respected, but protected. The duty of all governments is to defend the honour of mankind. Those who oppress or harm human beings impugn the glory and dignity of all. Those who harm other human beings are committing blasphemous acts. Thus, it is not at all surprising, that nations in the West have felt compelled to go to war against other nations which were believed to be violating human rights. The upshot has been a complete bloody mess.

In a recent article in World Affairs, entitled Saviors & Sovereigns: The Rise and Fall of Humanitarianism, Mark Mazower reviews the unseemly spectacle.

On November 9, 2001, George W. Bush created a new public holiday—World Freedom Day. The United States, he explained, would lead the global fight for “liberty, freedom and the universal struggle for human rights”; it would try to help the “more than two billion people” still living under repressive regimes. The idea that America could, or should, do this had informed a certain kind of Washington mind-set throughout the Cold War. But after the Berlin Wall came down, freedom’s crusaders increasingly set their eyes not so much on Communism as on violators of human rights in general. They unfurled the banner of humanitarianism and, righteously, scorned the cowards and skeptics who wanted to keep America’s powder dry.

Mazower suggests there are signs that going to war to defend human rights is becoming unfashionable, and cites President Obama's less "hawkish" tone. We believe this is nonsense: humanitarianism will not stop its wars until Human Rights doctrines are rejected. Obama continues to conduct its wars. Afghanistan has become part of the humanitarianism cause: American armed force is now being employed to "nation build" in that country. Humanitarianism remains firmly in place as a governing doctrine of the Republic.

Humanitarianism is implicitly absolutist, whilst hopelessly confused. This is a very dangerous combination. It creates happy hunting ground for populist manipulating politicians, hucksters and charlatans.

A pair of seminal scholarly articles from the early 1980s, influential on both left and right, offer a starting point: in these, Columbia University professor Michael Doyle argued that democracies were inherently peace-loving. The gratifying implication was that American security and international peace would both be served if existing democracies banded together and—perhaps—if they helped democratize the rest of the world as well.

The Balkans became the "theatre" where this doctrine was first played out.

At the time, the intellectual case for taking on Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo was being hammered out by no one in more public detail than by Michael Ignatieff (academic and current leader of the Canadian Liberal Party). In the aftermath of Bosnia, he had mused that the task of the contemporary intellectual was to defend “the universal against the violence and closure associated with the tribal, national, and ethnic.” Somewhat diffidently, he called for a defense of Western universalism as the alternative to tribalism. He did not dissent from the West’s right to intervene abroad on humanitarian grounds; his test was whether a breach of human rights threatened international peace.

Human Rights doctrines lead naturally into the ideology of humanitarianism, which, in turn leads the West to attempt to impose democracies on other nations--for their own good. Humanitarianism assumes that lying just beneath the surface of all oppressive and tyrannical governments are people who are true believers in Human Rights theology. Ironically, the more interventions occur, the more obvious it becomes that this is just plain flat-out wrong.

At least as worrying was the thought that the “ordinary people” in whom the intellectuals placed their hopes might not exist as imagined. Were they natural democrats? Not according to those who argued that even Yugoslavia’s descent into turmoil had been the product of mass nationalism and the political failure of less divisive movements. Radovan Karadzic and Franjo Tudjman were not tyrants, it was said, but the voices of a popular, deeply nationalistic general will, or the beneficiaries of the collapse of a one-party state and the democratization that followed. Soon, the idea that a “civil society” was waiting to be born in every dictatorship started to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

It is important to grasp that the doctrines of humanitarianism and interventions to punish human rights abusers is not a recent post-World War II phenomenon. It, like the Divine Rights of Kings, has been held for generations throughout Europe and the West in general.

The idea of humanitarian intervention was not a late-twentieth-century invention, of course. William Gladstone’s foray into Egypt more than a century earlier bore all the hallmarks of the idea, and one could go farther back. The re-emergence of the idea in the 1990s was the latest flourishing of a distinctive form of Western liberal thinking about global affairs. If liberal values were the only true values, then the West’s power and prestige should be deployed to promote them. And not merely to promote them, but to save suffering humanity from the excesses of that other Western invention, the idea of state sovereignty. With the United States in the ascendant after 1989—and a public culture steeped in the horrors of the Holocaust and the sinfulness of inaction in the face of evil—the temptation has been to elevate intervention to a general principle. As Jürgen Habermas wrote in 2008, through their mass violations of human rights, many states lost the presumption of innocence that entitled them to claim sovereignty. The cosmopolitan conscience must trump the autonomy of the evildoing dictator.

Knocking off a dictator is the easy part. Winning the "peace" is an entirely different matter.

Toppling dictators might staunch the worst human rights abuses. But the same Western public opinion that welcomed their fall blanched at the years, billions of dollars, and (Western) lives spent to build democratic institutions from scratch. Well before the election of Barack Obama, the drain on military resources posed by Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the fragility of the new institutions in Bosnia and Kosovo, suggested that we should be wary of imperial projects.

Human cultures and civilizations are incredibly thick with nuances, significances, and meanings. In the end they reflect the prevailing shared religious beliefs of human beings within a culture. Western Human Rights humanitarianism is no exception; it is nothing more, nor less than an imperialist, absolutist attempt to impose its own culture and religion upon other peoples of the world.

This, of course, is not to say that all cultures are equally moral or holy or sanctified. Many are deeply degenerate--and the West, sadly, falls into this category. But it is to say that regime change does not mean culture change. Holding elections does not mean changes of heart and world-view. Cultures can only change for the better (or worse) from the inside out, from new patterns of love, courtship, marriage, child rearing, family worship, work, and labour--and so forth. These are not the things that the West can speak authoritatively about any longer.

And the rest of the world knows it.