The Crisis of Our Times: Connecting The Dots

Prof. Paul Eidelberg, President – Israel–America Renaissance Institute

Part I. Introduction

Will Israel or the United States strike Iran before it deploys ballistic tipped nuclear weapons? Why this belated question? Why has America, the most powerful nation in the world, refrained from launching a preemptive strike against a regime whose president has the audacity to scream “Death to America”? Given the deadly attacks on American forces by Iranian proxies in the past, should the malediction by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be deemed a casus belli and elicit some sort of U.S. military attack on Iran?

Did Nazi Germany attack America before December 11, 1941? It was not till that day that the United States Congress declared war on Germany. Did the U.S. Congress base its declaration of war on international law? Would this have made any difference? Franklin D. Roosevelt understood very well that a Nazi-dominated Europe would have been the gravest threat to the United States. The same may be said of a nuclear-armed Iran, except that the present occupant of the White House is a post-American President, more precisely, a moral relativist. Never mind his exalting Islam, which exudes moral absolutism.

As a moral relativist, Mr. Obama should be morally indifferent to the number of civilian casualties that would inevitably result from a U.S. attack on Iran. Relativism aside, can a people rightly be held responsible for the official acts of its government?

Albert Einstein, a kindly man and a pacifist, answers this question. In a message honoring the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto, Einstein declared: “The Germans as an entire people are responsible for the mass murders and must be punished as a people if there is justice in the world and if the consciousness of collective responsibility in the nations is not to perish from the earth entirely”

Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill, who were not moral relativists, seems to have had moral qualms about the napalm-bombing of Dresden, which incinerated an estimated 25,000 Germans. The firebombing of the much more densely populated Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March 1945 was more deadly; indeed, it has been said to be single deadliest air raid of World War II, greater than Hiroshima or Nagasaki as single events.

Whether moral distinctions should be made differentiating Germany from Japan in that war is an issue beyond the scope of this essay. But this issue may arise again should the United States or Israel launch a preemptive attack on Iran. Such an attack is bound to kill “non-combatants,” but would they be entirely innocent? Have they not heard the genocidal maledictions of their government? Besides, Iran’s government has a long criminal record of fostering and financing international terrorism. Its leaders have not only issued genocidal threats against America and Israel, but Iranian proxies have killed hundreds Americans and Israelis during the past two decades.

However, even at this late date—and Israel and America may be approaching the moment of truth—we may hope it will not be necessary to launch a preemptive attack on Iran. But we dare not obscure or minimize what is at stake in this juncture of history. Iran, a Shi’ite Muslim country of almost 80 million people stands athwart the Persian Gulf. Through the Hormuz Strait there flows much of the oil on which the world’s economy depends. It’s not just oil. The lives and quality of life of hundreds of millions of people depend on that oil.

Nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles deployed by Iran’s ruling Revolution Guard would constitute not only an obvious existential threat to Israel. Such missiles would enable Iran to control the Middle East and beyond. Ahmadinejad’s visit to Venezuela’s American-hating dictator Hugo Chavez should remind us Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Remember Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban missile crisis?

And then there’s Europe. Iran has tested a variety of missiles. Its long range missiles can reach not only Israel but also and Europe. Europe, cowed by its own growing Muslim population will roll over. With the loss of its European markets America will collapse. This is not hyperbole. But let’s probe a little deeper, into the realm of ideas and regimes.

Part II. Post-Modern Democracy

A liberal and egalitarian democracy like the United States is psychologically ill-equipped to deal with the catastrophic threat mentioned above. America is steeped in the vulgar and anti-heroic doctrine of moral relativism. This relativism undermines national pride and a person’s readiness to fight and if necessary die for his country.

Relativism is not the only emasculating doctrine of liberal democracy. Unknown to most academics and intellectuals, liberal democracies suffer from a political versus pedagogical contradiction. On the one hand, they exalt individual freedom; on the other hand, their behavioral sciences—sociology, psychology, and criminology—generally attribute antisocial or criminal behavior to economic and genetic causes. In other words, while democracies preach freedom, their universities, by and large, teach determinism. This confusion leads to another.

Democracies are based on the primacy of consent as opposed to coercion. This predisposes their governments to resolve conflicts even with non-democratic regimes by diplomacy and reciprocity, ignoring the fact that these adversarial regimes are based on the primacy of intimidation. But what is most striking and ludicrous, as well as shameless, is the sight of liberal democratic diplomats consorting with Muslims who despise democracy and for whom mendacity is very much a way of life—a statement that can be confirmed by Muslims who have somehow liberated themselves from the decadence that has befallen Islam.

The failure of democracies to take Islam seriously—for which we may thank the Iilluminati that dominate western universities—is the reason why the awful moment of truth is approaching. While Iranian Ahmadinejad screams “death to America,” Mr. Obama’s advisers, academically processed idiots, urge him to challenge a facsimile of Genghis Kahn to a game of “Conflict Resolution.” Here, let us pause.

It should be obvious that the character of a regime shapes its foreign policies. In a democracy, those policies are very much influenced by the dogmas of democratically subservient political scientists. These academics very often become the advisers of governments, of the political officials that formulate a nation’s foreign policy. Nietzsche has said that great learning and great stupidity go well together under the same hat. I have validated Nietzsche’s adage by subjecting to critical analysis books written by Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and books written by the late Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi, a Middle East expert who was the mentor of Shimon Peres, Israel’s erstwhile Defense Minister and Prime Minister. These two high-placed academics were moral relativists. Unsurprisingly, both were leftists.

Dot One: Brzezinski advocated drastic reductions in military expenditures on the one hand, and “outreach” to the Soviet Union on the other. (Professor B has been linked to Barack Obama, himself a relativist, who is aping the Brzezinski-Carter appeasement policy.)

Dot Two: Shimon Peres opposed the bombing of the Iraq’s Osirak reactor; orchestrated the Israel-PLO Agreement; and, like his academic mentor, advocates the creation of a Palestinian state—a nation state for what Mr. Newt Gingrich calls an “invented people” (which should make us wonder about the mentality of Harkabi, which I discuss at length in my book Demophrenia, whose thesis is that moral relativism is a mental disorder that afflicts contemporary democratic societies.)

Connect the dots. It’s not a conspiracy. The university-bred doctrine of moral relativism is a phenomenon of post-modern democracy—democracy in its senility. This doctrine, which surfaced in America in the beginning the second decade of the twentieth century, has been propagated, first by a few, then by many, and now by almost all American colleges and universities. The subject is elaborated in my article “The Crisis of Our Rimes.” The article was published in the American Congressional Record, Senate, July 31, 1968, pp. E.7150-E.7157.?

August 22, 2012 | 4 Comments »

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  1. It is not just Iran.

    None of the Arab/Moslem countries in NE Africa/SW Asia have suffered any serious consequences for what they have done at home or abroad.

    None of them have really experienced modern war as, for example, Europe and Japan or the USSR did during WW2. They’ve never, ever had the living snot beaten out of them. The closest thing would be the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s, but even that was chiefly a WW1-style slugfest in which the vast majority of casualties were generated on static front lines. Only those “sent the front” knew the carnage (including about 100,000 boys used as human mine detectors, an effort led and organizedin in part by A-jad). The cities were not razed.

    There were of course the wars fought with Israel, but Israel was always too restrained – be herself and by the “international community – to really hit hard with gloves off. The 1982 Lebanon war showcased the hardest Israel would hit, but most of the damage done to Lebanon was done by their own sectarian strife, not the IDF.

    I have always maintained that had we gone directly at the perpetrators of 9-11 directly, “gloves off”, and the roots I’d identify here are both Iran and Saudi Arabia, while we might have suffered substantial casualties, it still would have been far less than what we did in WW2…and the war would be over by now. Well within the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, a national mobilization followed by a serious war – which Bush the Younger had the political capital to do in the immediate wake of 9-11 – we could have duly and decisively beat the snot out of our Moslem adversaries.

    But instead, Bush exorted us all to “go shopping”. And fawned before Prince and later King Abdullah at his ranch the following May, to whom Obama later bowed.

    And now we have Obama, the crowing achievement of the Saudi/Gulf Arab lobby, their Frankenstein Monster programmed Mancurian Candidate Anti-Israel political cruise missile, leading us into dhimmitude.

    It may already be too late for now. We may be in for a long, long night.

  2. The Iranians have never, ever suffered consequences for anything they have done. Correct me if I’m wrong. Please. Somebody.