It sounds like history is returning to Europe.
A new open letter has been published in France warning of the threat of civil war and claiming to have more than 130,000 signatures from the public. The message, published in a right-wing magazine, accuses the French government of granting “concessions” to Islamism.
“It is about the survival of our country,” said the text, said to be issued anonymously by soldiers and appealing for public support.
This note can be traced back to the Arab Spring, and to Iraq in 2003. Remember Samantha Power and R2P (responsibility to protect)? I do. After progressive governments thought it was “nice” to topple multiple Arab regimes last decade, they were rewarded with a bunch of migrants. That led directly to Brexit, the splintering of the EU and now these French generals threatening civil war. R2P was like pouring gasoline on a fire to try and save the house.
Of course, the progressives will just blame everyone else for their stupid mistakes. But history is clear: The result of “classical enlightenment liberalism” applied to the Middle East was to start civil wars that killed about a million people. And Egypt barely escaped political destruction at its hands; which would have made the Syrian war look like a snowball fight.
Why is it so rare for us to evaluate the idea of exporting “classical Enlightenment liberalism” to other countries by its results – not by its ideas or by its goals, which don’t matter, but by what does matter: its actual impact on physical reality?
It helps to think about this philosophy as if it were a drug undergoing application for approval. There is no instance anywhere or at any time that this drug has been applied without significant morbidity. Even in the fall of the Soviet Union and the American Revolution, there was serious morbidity. Standards of civilisation are now lost that won’t be regained. The quality of government by the new regime is visibly lower in many ways. Did “classical Enlightenment liberalism” result in… lower taxes? Uh huh.
And these are the good outcomes! More often, as in France in 1789 and Russia in 1914, we see enormous disasters. Don’t even get me started on Iraq in 2003. The patient is rushed to the ER and is lucky to only lose a leg. Then he dies a month later, of sepsis. Sure, it’s the sepsis that killed him, not the drug. This sort of excuse is always given by progressives.
Russia, France and Syria always have two revolutions, not one. The first revolution is the good one. The second, which usurps the first, is bad. OK, but you couldn’t have the second without the first. It’s like saying that the cure for stage II melanoma is stage I melanoma. And Occam’s razor is nowhere to be seen.
The thing about “classical Enlightenment liberalism” is that the toxic impact of democratic revolution on the Anglosphere was a bit weaker here than in the rest of the world. Despite being stricken by revolutions and civil wars, Anglo-American civilisation went to the moon, split the atom and conquered the world. Somehow, the impact of our revolutions is negative, but their unmeasurable net impact is positive. I don’t believe it. After all, most diseases show the strongest resistance in the area of their origin. And a poison that makes you sick, but kills your enemy, is an excellent weapon.
If you see democracy as a pest, like the common brushtail possum, it makes perfect sense why Anglo-American civilisation managed to be successful despite its democracy. The brushtail possum originates in Australia. Therefore, Australian trees are resistant to the brushtail possum. But not immune! The animal still eats a lot of leaves. But the Australian trees live.
The result of globalisation is that brushtail possums now dominate the world. A tree does not live anywhere in the world unless it is a eucalyptus. It would be a mistake to conclude from this that brushtail possums are good for trees and the Australians should export the hungry beast to everyone. Unless they’re just plain evil.
It is obvious that politics in the Anglo-American tradition (don’t forget, Marx wrote in the British Library, and his column appeared in the New York Tribune) – a) frequently causes serious damage to Anglo-American countries, and b) almost always one (or both) of two results in other countries: it either causes massive, traumatic disasters, or brings the country under effective Anglo-American supervision.
In other words, exporting democracy is a political weapon. This weapon has run out of enemies and no one really understands its purpose anymore, which last century was external subversion against genuine peer-level competitors.
Now the pest just runs around doing its best to burn down the world with gasoline under quasi-religious ideals like R2P and anti-racismsexismhomowhatever. There will probably never be another US Embassy in Libya in our lifetimes, for instance – it’s 100% Mad Max from here on out – because US diplomacy will instinctively side against the physically stronger party, even though Libya desperately needs a decent dose of domestic strength.
This is why the international community is still so pissed off at Sri Lanka for actually winning its war. For one thing, thousands of good jobs in the aid industry were lost as a result of the Sinhalese victory. That war was a career! And it’s also why the Israel/Palestine squabble cannot be solved so long as the US government is involved. Burning down the world with “freedom and democracy” is the State Department’s job. And career civil servants are, of course, tenured both individually and institutionally.
The problems started way before Barack Obama or George W Bush (remember him!). Even after reading heavily propagandised school textbooks about 20th century history, most people will still say with a straight face that “classical Enlightenment liberalism” was an unalloyed good for the world. It’s hard to blame them. Everyone is vulnerable to believing lies.
But the truth is, in the 20th century about 200 million people experienced murder by government. Nothing like the military and paramilitary mass murders of the last century was seen in Europe since early antiquity, and in Eurasia since Genghis Khan. Mediaeval Europe had isolated instances of democide — the Albigensian crusade, the sack of Magdeburg, various pogroms. But nothing like the industrial mass murders of which every side that fought in World War I and II was guilty.
Optimism about all this is naked insanity. We have left the 20th century, but we’re still ruled by its institutions. Yes, the wars ended, but only because one player won absolutely. Now we’re emerging from a few decades of peace at a dreadful long-term cost to the human race: the creation of a single global polity. Everywhere but at its core, peace is fraying into pure anarchy.
The French generals are correct in that migration is low-level warfare and could switch to actual warfare very quickly. Every time there is an intermingling of humans living in an essentially civilised/governed lifestyle with those living an essentially tribal/ungoverned lifestyle the result eventually is war. It scarcely matters whether the latter are historic hunter-gatherer people, or “ferals” descended from civilised ancestors.
In the late Roman Empire, for instance, along with the usual Teutonic barbarians, there were groups called “baguadae,” which were completely indigenous and highly barbarous. Bandit gangs, basically, just like the gangs in Central America. And not only in Central America. These are parallel governments in a sense, but completely barbaric and informal in their organisation.
This leads to a) high rates of interhuman predation, where urban areas become unsafe for the civilised by night or day and b) mass internal migrations due to concern for physical safety. Has anything like this happened in your neighbourhood? It’s a highly pathognomonic symptom.
The French generals are explaining the realities of power. A regime which cannot preserve the physical safety of its subjects against systematic human predation is a sick regime. It is losing the essence of government: the absolute monopoly on violence.
Accelerated internal decay of various kinds (cultural, political, economic) is seen in regimes which become physically immune to external competition. As with a business, competition keeps a nation-state efficient and effective. I think this has held true in all eras. And it suggests “classical Enlightenment liberalism” will age quite badly. The French generals are preparing for what comes after the failed experiment.
The results of “classical Enlightenment liberalism” are objectively terrible – gigantic wars, laden with the utmost brutality on every side, creating a giant bureaucratic world empire, now starting to rot all over the place, that we call the “international community”. There are plenty of reasons to declare this experiment a non-success and restore the Westphalian world where nations were sovereign and expected to look after their own interests.
In fact, that should be New Zealand’s only response to the letter: France has nothing to do with us. If we adopted this attitude 100 years ago, think of how many fifth cousins you would have today?
I admire a changing regime which appears determined to actually enforce its own laws, and whose first priority is the interests and safety of its own population. It is not exactly the Scouring of the Shire. It won’t be. But after such hole-digging, I don’t mind a little filling in.
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