A Summary of the week by Conrad Black

The dreadful terrorist incident in Norway, land of the fjords, mountain maidens, sing-song voices and the highest per capita standard of living in the world, was afflicted by a mass murderer a man whom the left falsely seized on as a manifestation of Christian lunacy and racism.

Meanwhile, the unimaginable indignities in Washington over the debt ceiling are among the most disgracefully irresponsible, bipartisan fiascoes in that capital since the last filibuster of an anti-lynching bill more than 50 years ago.  Except for the Senate leaders, no one is making any sense.  The president is whining like a malfunctioning appliance instead of sounding like the leader of a great nation.  The House Speaker, John Boehner, as of this writing on Friday afternoon, has lost control of his own caucus and is going back and forth like a shuttlecock.  The best that can be said for him is that he isn’t Nancy Pelosi.

The minimalist deficit-reducers on the Democrat side are masquerading as defenders of the disadvantaged, and are offering reduction plans based on unspecified, unenforceable, (phantom) cuts over the next 10 years; and the GOP deficit hawks are babbling insensate nonsense about a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.  American politics have always had their share of idiots, harpies, poseurs and crooks.  Some of them quite colorful, but this political landscape is almost a wasteland.  Hillary Clinton’s promise of “crippling sanctions” against Iran has produced only inconveniences; one of the only effects has been to cause that unspeakable regime to abandon price controls and subsidies.  That has won the praise of the IMF (whose former president remains an inductee in New York despite the fact that he is obviously not guilty of anything — now an American tradition).  So the American policy has failed to retard nuclear development but has shored up the Iranian economy, the opposite of what was intended.

The NATO war against Muammar Gadaffi has now adopted the goal of deposing the mad Colonel but allowing him to remain in country.  This would assure either a quick return to power by the despot we have fired thousands of air-to-ground missiles to dispose of, or his assassination, in a shorter time than Napoleon resided at Elba.  NATO has no standing to speak or negotiate for a future regime in Libya over domestic asylum for its outgoing leader.

Eminent historian Walter Russell Mead wrote in The American Interest that the fact that even a prosperous and advanced democracy such as Norway could produce a person who wrote intelligently about a legitimate concern and could act on his concerns with such terrible and psychotic violence, killing 76 people and attempting to wipe out the entire political class, should cause us all to seek a religious revival: “We have one foot in Norway and the other in hell … Whatever is coming, we will face it more honestly and live it more richly with [God].”

As a practicing Roman Catholic, I can’t take issue with his conclusion, but would not espouse it for the same reason.  But there is no reason to trace Breivik’s insane violence to declining religiosity.  Jihadists are frequently the most demonstratively religious people of all, and noisy espousers of their version of God.  Religious fanatics are not too far back from the front of the race between the most odious perpetrators of atrocities, and the world has always had people who could reason correctly and express themselves well, who yet resorted to mad and horribly murderous conduct.  They are too numerous and notorious to require the citation of examples.

We mustn’t take Norwegian tourist brochures so seriously that we imagine that wholesome and rich country to be incapable of producing violent lunatics.  My friend George Jonas wrote eloquently in these pages that terrorist acts have an ample tradition in many of the sophisticated countries of Western Europe.  The only possible conclusion, apart from the randomness of the occurrence of such deranged people and horrible acts, is that the European political class has so badly bungled the issue of Muslim immigration, that it has increased the likelihood of these awful misdeeds.

That does not make the politicians responsible for Islam-phobic terrorists, any more than the peoples of these democratic countries, who have abandoned the practice of natural demographic renewal through numerically adequate reproduction, can be blamed for not having foreseen that their unborn children would be replaced by unassimilated Muslims who would be invoked as the justification for terrorist acts.

It also debunks the theory that beyond a certain level of prosperity, democracies become entirely peaceful and stable.  And it makes clearer than ever the hypocrisy and injustice of persecuting freely elected and non-violent people who have warned of these problems, even if sometimes in over excited terms, such as Wilders in the Netherlands, and the systematic denigration of contrarian intellectuals, such as Danish historian Lars Hedegaard.

Returning for a final word on the childish carnival in Washington, three reflections on the fiscal condition of the United States come to mind.  I don’t believe the country will default and never have.  I think the Senate leaders will pull something out of the hat, but it will be far from a solution.  In any event, if the U.S. does default, apart from the incitement of panic and hysteria among the usual suspects, it will only result in the unmasking of an inflationary process already chronically advanced, or a guillotine on public spending that would be very drastic and arbitrary, but not entirely unwelcome.

~ C. Black