By Barry Rubin

Almost daily nowadays–I’m tempted to write, “almost hourly”–one sees atrocities in deeds and shamefulness in words. Friends, colleagues, and readers often tell me how depressing it is to live in these times.

I could give lots of examples but will let you choose your own. Caught between the big mistakes of one’s own leaders, extremist ideologies and movements in large parts of the world, irresponsibility of too much of the media, and the abandonment of Enlightenment standards in intellectual discourse, it is easy to feel down.

Wow, I better stop here as I’m depressing myself. And yet, while there is much reason to be disgusted and a good basis for worrying, I tell them that things will turn out all right. Western civilization is not on the road to collapse; the Middle East is not going to be taken over by al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on.

Agreed, it isn’t enough just to assert a happy ending is inevitable, so let’s look at some key factors as to why this is so:

First, the worse things get, the more people realize that things have gotten worse. Precisely the experience of seeing how intransigent and murderous are the extremists, how efforts at negotiation fail, how past concessions are exploited to bash those who make them, how dangerous Islamism is, among other factors, forces countries to react against them, intellectuals to denounce them, and public opinion to shift against them.

This is the process followed in the crises of dealing with fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, and with communism in the 1940s and 1950s. John F. Kennedy, or at least his ghostwriter, penned a book called Why England Slept on the first of these three ordeals. Bruce Bawyer wrote a good book entitled Why Europe Slept regarding the current one. Foreign terrorists and domestic fools provide the wake-up calls.

Second, the enemy side makes big mistakes. They push too far, demand too much, shoot off their mouths as well as their guns. The ideological extremism, tendency toward endless splits, blatant dishonesty, and inability to build alliances all take their toll. They simply cannot keep up their pretenses at moderation.

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The mask falls all too often. Hamas, Hizballah, Ahmadinejad all provide good examples of this phenomenon in the Middle East. On Western campuses, extremist academics and students horrify onlookers. Most people in the West don’t hate their own countries and will be put off with those who all too obviously do.

Third, a lot of the current unpleasantness, at least in the West, is transient. It is the belated tantrum of the 1960s’ generation’s old radicals. This is not to deny that there are many younger imitators but the leadership and impetus is coming from those veterans of so many dubious battles, to use the novelist John Steinbeck’s phrase about the 1930s.

I have found that most undergraduates just don’t accept the propaganda they are being fed, about the Middle East and other things. Yes, it will have a lasting impact but some of that will be a reaction against nonsense.

Another factor here is the hysterical hatred of President George W. Bush or, if you prefer it this way, the impact of that government’s divisive and mistaken policies. On January 20, 2009, Bush will leave office. If his replacement is anywhere near mainstream, that person is going to follow more than 80 percent of the current U.S. foreign policy program, Iraq being the big exception of course. I estimate that about 25 percent of current craziness will fade rather quickly, both in the United States and in Europe. The more hardcore silly people will carry on but at lot of the support will fall away.

Finally, I am tempted to quote the saying that “the dogs bark but the caravan moves on” though that can no doubt be twisted into some politically incorrect slur. Let’s just put it this way: Don’t pay too much attention to op-eds, the rantings of academics (or in Britain, academic unions), and even certain newspapers which seem to resemble campus revolutionary clubs more than great metropolitan dailies.

George Orwell, one of the best guides to the current insanity given his dealings with the last round, once referred to an idea so stupid that only an intellectual would believe it. This hurts me to say but such people all too often lack both responsibility and a sense of the real world. They have set themselves up as a counter-force to those who govern and run the economy.

Angry, jealous, dissatisfied, they believe they could do a better job. William F. Buckley, the American conservative intellectual, once stated that he would rather be governed by people chosen randomly off the street than the faculty of Harvard University. History has absolved him on that concept.

What better way to end than to quote a poem written by Orwell in June 1943:

“I wrote in nineteen-forty that at need
I’d fight to keep the Nazis out of Britain….
How shocked the pinks were! …
One had the effrontery
To write three pages calling me a ‘traitor,’
So black a crime it is to love one’s country.

Your game is easy, and its rules are plain….
Cry havoc when we bomb a German city,
When Czechs get killed don’t worry in the least….
Don’t mention Jews–in short, pretend the war is
Simply a racket “got up” by the Tories.”

You know, sort of like the War on Terrorism or the struggle with radical Islamism.

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Barry Rubin is Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center university. His co-authored book, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, (Oxford University Press) is now available in paperback and in Hebrew. His latest book, The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, was published by Wiley in November 2005. Prof. Rubin’s columns can be read online at: http://gloria.idc.ac.il/columns/column.html.

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The Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center
Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya P.O. Box 167 Herzliya, 46150 Israel
Email: gloria@idc.ac.il Phone: +972-9-960-2736 Fax: +972-9-956-8605
© 2007 All rights reserved.

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Related: Arab/Muslim World, War Against Islamo-fascism, Philosophy / Ideology

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