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 he
Nuremberg Rally at Durban, South Africa, could hardly be more perfect,
because it marvelously dramatizes the rot that has taken hold of
the Western world. Back in the 80's, when the Lebanese Christians
were under armed assault from their Muslim compatriots, their leader
— whose name escapes me — stood up in his foxhole and
said, "the Western world should either defend us, or change
its name." It didn't defend them (indeed, in recent weeks the
Syrians and their puppets in Beirut have been rounding up Christians
in the latest round of religious purges), it didn't change its name,
and it hasn't learned a thing.
The diminishing
number of people who seriously study human history know, as Machiavelli
put it so neatly, that man is more inclined to do evil than to do
good. Precisely because some great leaders fully understood our
malevolent impulses, the Western world has established a set of
rules to protect mankind from the unfettered fulfillment of our
darkest desires. We call that civilization, and it is a thin veneer
atop the explosive forces of human nature, which constantly threaten
to destroy it. The rules of civility are not widely accepted, and
they require constant vigilance, and not a little brute force, to
survive. That is why, in one of the little paradoxes that make the
study of history so fascinating, those who talk "peace and
love" all the time invariably open the door to war and hate,
far more than those who, recognizing our evil inclinations, insist
on rigorously imposing virtue.
Durban was
to have been a celebration of goodness, a condemnation of our worst
practices (from racism to xenophobia), and a call to arms to the
entire world. In practice, it is the very opposite: a celebration
of hatred, an embrace of racism, an orgy of xenophobia, with the
Western world as the prime object of xenophobic and racist hatred.
And the Western world, in Durban as in Beirut, dithers and apologizes,
and finally the United States and Israel took their marbles and
went home.
This is what
happens to the Western world after years of political correctness
and idiotic revisionism, blaming us for all the sins of the others.
Indeed, in the rhetoric of the Durban rally, it is only the West
that bears responsibility for evil in the world. Slavery, which
for centuries was a universal human practice, and which endures
today only outside the West, is blamed on the West and on no one
else, even though it was the West that first abolished slavery.
The ultimate absurdity of the Durban rhetoric is that the Jews —
the first people on earth to condemn slavery and to proclaim that
all men were children of God — have been singled out for the
harshest condemnation, and it was a pleasure to hear the Israeli
delegate remind the racists of Durban of this fact.
To be sure,
not all the delegates are totally ignorant of human history. The
president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, is a descendant of African
kings, and he dryly observed that his ancestors owned slaves. Who,
then, should pay reparations to the Senegalese? And there was hardly
a dry eye in the house when they heard the life story of Mariama
Oumarou, from the village of Tambeye in Nigeria. There, in keeping
with a tradition that has endured through the centuries, the "white
Tuaregs," that is, the rich traders, enslave the "black
Tuaregs" from the poor villages. Mariama Oumarou is the descendant
of slaves, and is herself a slave, in a country governed by black
people in which slavery is formally forbidden. Who will save her
from slavery? And who should pay reparations to the black Tuaregs
of Nigeria?
You will not
hear these questions — real questions about the real world
— from the organizers and the spokesmen at Durban, because
their agenda is quite different. They are on the attack against
the Western world, because our success, based on egalitarian values
(no matter how imperfectly practiced) and free enterprise, threaten
their cozy arrangements. If Mr. Thabo Mbeki, the Qosa ruler of South
Africa, were an honest man, he would have dropped to his knees in
gratitude to the West for having forced the end of the apartheid
regime in his country, and enabling a great Qosa prince, Nelson
Mandela, to become its president. Instead, Mbeki has given the prestige
and the wealth of his country to the racist predations of Robert
Mugabe, the vicious and corrupt president of Zimbabwe. Perhaps Mbeki
does not want to hear Western delegates ask why members of other
South African tribes rarely rise to high positions in the South
African Government.
He need not
worry. Jesse Jackson has not one harsh word for the Durban xenophobic
anti-Semites. The misnamed American Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights regrets some of the expressions of anti-Semitism, but condemns
the United States for walking out, fatuously claiming that we deprived
ourselves of the chance to get the language toned down (not mentioning
that we had already tried, but failed). The NAACP website has not
a single word of condemnation of Durban racism. Entire gaggles of
self-proclaimed black "leaders" embrace Durban, and insist
on reparations for American slavery.
Their aggressive
self-confidence reflects the timorous self-doubt of the West, brainwashed
by a generation of cultural relativism, multiculturism, structural
deconstructionism, and simple hatred of whitey, into paying hush
money and hoping the whole bad dream will go away. Israel went through
a similar phase, and much of the Durban rhetoric can be found in
the essays and textbooks produced by the State of Israel itself
during the dark years of self-doubt that brought the Israelis to
the brink of national suicide. On the steps to the scaffold, they
seem to have realized their error, acknowledged that their enemies
would not be content with words or even limited quantities of land
and lucre, and have begun to fight for their survival and their
noble traditions.
We must do
the same. Congress should applaud the president for having the courage
to give the back of our national hand to the Durban thugs and fools,
and should condemn those Americans who refused to stand up for our
national honor and our civilized values. And the president should
take the opportunity to remind the American people of our uniqueness,
which is the wonder of the world, and which drives the enemies of
freedom to such grotesque excesses as we are witnessing on the shores
of the Indian Ocean.
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