http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3391
From the desk of John Laughland
Pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté! No liberty for the enemies of liberty has always been the revolutionary principle, ever since Saint-Just (“The Angel of the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3109 of Canterbury last week, saying that the introduction of sharia law was both inevitable and desirable, and that idea of a sovereign state with a single law for all was “problematic” because it is not pluralist and tolerant enough, has inevitably caused a storm.
The speech did not come out of the blue. For many decades now, clerics including in the Catholic church have espoused nothing but a tepid brew of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2627 Gottfried argued some years ago in his excellent book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, the secularist project merely causes theological forms of behaviour to erupt into the political realm, often in a particularly nasty and deformed way. When priests stop talking about morality, other people start talking about it instead.This was illustrated on 12th February in a speech by the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. He called the speech “The Democratic Imperative”, perhaps an unconscious allusion to “the categorical imperative,” the centrepiece of the moral philosophy of the man who did most to introduce secularism and to banish God from the public realm, Immanuel Kant. Miliband’s view is that the democratic states of the world have a moral duty to intervene, including with military force, to support democracy around the world.
Miliband’s debt to Kant is very great, since he invokes the concept of moral universalism, but it is perhaps greater to his mentor, Tony Blair, who advocated the same thing at the height of the Kosovo war in 1999, in his speech entitled “The Doctrine of the International Community” and greater still to Leon Trotsky and V. I. Lenin, the men for whom his grandfather fought in the Red Army, and who, like Miliband, also believed in enforcing world revolution by military might.
The Foreign Secretary marshalled three arguments which, he said, are counter-arguments to “the democratic imperative”. Although he claimed to demolish each one in turn, he in fact failed to address the single most important counter-argument to interventionism and its claim that promoting democracy is “moral”, namely that, on the contrary, interventionism is deeply immoral.
This is not difficult to show. Kosovo is about to declare its independence. Naturally there will be a lot of crowing about how the NATO war of 1999 was fought for universal values and about how it therefore showed the rightness of interventionism. Yet you do not have to accept that the original war was evil (as I believe it was) to see that the subsequent administration of the province has been catastrophic. As Matthias Brügmann reported in Handelsblatt on 2nd February (“Das Scheitern der Welt” – “The World’s Failure”), and as I know from my own bitter experience, Kosovo is a hell-hole. The United Nations administration there has ruthlessly sacrificed its own institutional self-interest to that of the Kosovo people; it has consumed tens of billions of dollars without providing for any of the basics for civilised life – there is no proper electricity supply and there are power cuts all the time; and the place is run by the Mafia, the former KLA leader Hashim http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2901 about that?
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2964