From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   The Enemies of Freedom Are Deadlier Than Ever   
   By Gerard Baker, Oct. 23, 2023, WSJ   
   Central to the West’s idea of its modern historic supremacy has been the   
   comforting myth that we have prevailed because of the superiority of our ideas.   
      
   Might in the end can’t overcome right, we think. The brute force of tyranny   
   and totalitarian terror can succeed for a while—even a long while—but   
   eventually, the human yearning for freedom and justice has an inescapable   
   logic. It is not so much    
   that right will always overcome might, as that being “right” confers on us   
   a power that is mightier than any dictator could ever muster.   
      
   This is a geopolitical version of Whiggish history, the idea that the world is   
   evolving on some great hidden trajectory toward liberty, democracy and   
   enlightenment. “The arc of the moral universe . . . bends toward justice,”   
   as Martin Luther King Jr.    
   put it.   
      
   But what if it doesn’t?   
      
   Looking back, not only to the last century or two but to earlier epochs,   
   history can seem more like a random walk through periods of progress and   
   retreat, light and darkness, civilization and tyranny, than a straight arrow   
   aimed at freedom and peace.   
      
   In the 16th century, more than 2,000 years after the citizens of Athens had   
   been meeting to make policy, spend public money and elect leaders in the form   
   of government that gave us the word “democracy,” the city and its   
   residents cowered under the    
   heel of a distant ruler, a subjugated outpost of a vast foreign empire.   
      
   The Roman Republic may not have been democratic in our understanding of the   
   term, but its constitutional order and many of its institutions served as   
   templates for the modern American republic. Yet it was soon enough replaced by   
   imperial rule that, while    
   it retained the trappings of republicanism, was for centuries a personal   
   autocracy that was in turn eventually replaced by barbarous chaos.   
      
   You could argue that the almost innate sense we have that justice and freedom   
   will prevail in the end is merely the most recent example of winners’   
   history: that the world as it exists is the product of the military and   
   strategic victory of the U.S.    
   and its allies in World War II and the Cold War. We won. So in our telling of   
   the story we insist that there was something inevitable about the ultimate   
   righteous triumph of freedom. Our confidence is so complete we even declare   
   that history is over.   
      
   But history is alive and well, and as unpredictable as ever. It turns on   
   hinges. Time, chance and the application of human genius or folly can—for   
   long periods—supersede vast impersonal forces. If Adolf Hitler hadn’t   
   invaded the Soviet Union in    
   1941, there’s a reasonable chance that most of Europe would today be   
   preparing to celebrate the centenary of the thousand-year reich (though when   
   you witness the anti-Semitic demonstrations across European cities taking   
   place right now, you could be    
   forgiven for wondering whether many of those countries didn’t embrace some   
   Nazi values after all).   
      
   The impact of the so-called soft power the U.S. exercised during the Cold War   
   was critical to our success—and in that sense the idea that values, as well   
   as simple force, can be historically determinative isn’t wholly wrong.   
      
   But the power of our example would never have been enough without the example   
   of our power. In the absence of sustained military commitments, strategic   
   engagement and repeated sacrifice, there was nothing guaranteed about the   
   victory of our ideas.   
      
   We need to remember that truth as we survey the world today. Not since the   
   worst days of the Cold War, perhaps not since the 1930s, have we faced such a   
   combination of threats to our freedom and prosperity, to our very existence. A   
   touching faith in the    
   supposed universality of our ideals and the inevitable rightness of our cause   
   won’t save us.   
      
   A modern de facto alliance of tyrannies—we might call it an axis of evil   
   opportunism—advances across the globe. China, Russia, Iran—and you can   
   probably add, if only because of the sheer malevolent volatility of its leader   
   and its possession of    
   weapons of unfathomable destruction—North Korea.   
      
   They don’t see the triumph of the West and its values. They see a weakened   
   and declining West, an America at odds with itself over its identity and its   
   leadership in the world, a nation enfeebled by deepening self-doubt, widening   
   division, widespread    
   mistrust, timid leadership, institutional paralysis and soaring debt. They   
   see, as we have seen this last week, a culture—in the media, educational   
   institutions, public discourse—that increasingly does their work for them,   
   willfully propagating    
   falsehoods that advance their cause, always eager to attribute evil to us and   
   not to our enemies.   
      
   If there is one benefit we can draw from the atrocities we have witnessed by   
   Iran’s proxy Hamas in Israel this month it is this: It is a heart-stopping   
   reminder of what is at stake, a brutal warning that we take for granted what   
   we have earned and what    
   we have fought for at our own peril.   
      
   It isn’t our values and our ideas that may ensure we prevail in this   
   struggle, but the terrifying recognition of how fragile those values and ideas   
   are.   
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-enemies-of-freedom-are-deadlier   
   than-ever-1808f108   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)