‘Conscience,’ Hamlet says, ‘does make cowards of us all.’

Or does cowardice claim the name of conscience – steal its identity – in order to excuse itself? 

Conscience should drive us, as individuals, to do what we believe to be morally right. But it may be a self-flattering word we use to explain why we do certain things that we actually do out of craven cowardice itself, or the sort of moral vanity that makes us want to appear virtuous rather than to act virtuously.

Governments, nations, and crowds also cover their actions with the same deceptive claim, attributing to conscience what they really do out of weakness, fear, stupidity,  hypocrisy and ideological romanticism.  

False conscience calls itself by many other names, among them these: political correctness; respect for multiculturalism or ‘diversity’; a striving for ‘social justice’ or economic equality or ‘fairness’;  remorse for (largely imaginary) historical sins. Under such names all kinds of idiotic, unjust, destructive and evil things are done.    

Exempli gratia from the real world: 

In the US millions of voters elect an unqualified candidate to political office because he is black.

Navies refrain from capturing pirates, or (even better) summarily killing them, because ‘they have human rights’.

Liberal democratic welfare states keep and protect alien Islamic preachers of terrorism and sedition, lavishly house, feed, educate and medically treat them (and their pluralities of wives and families) at the expense of their intended victims, the indigenous population, because if they’re returned to their own countries they may be tortured or executed – or even because some witness at their possible trials might be tortured.

Western governments abrogate freedom because citizens use it to criticize Muslims and their beliefs. 

European police refrain from enforcing the law against Muslim offenders.  

In Britain the rule of a single Law of the Land, the very thing that makes it possible for people of different provenance to live together in harmony, is arbitrarily abandoned by the acceptance of Sharia as a second system of law, although it is incompatible with and contradictory to the enchorial system. 

Western nations reduce their defensive power to the point of ineffectiveness while vicious tyrannical regimes, inimical to the West and motivated by a declared intention of aggression, acquire arsenals of nuclear weapons. 

Governments interfere in markets and impoverish the people.  

Jillian Becker  November 21, 2008

 Obama speaks of a WIND OF CHANGE blowing through America.  In February 1960 the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan  made a speech in which he said that the WIND OF CHANGE was blowing through Africa. 

We are not accusing Obama – or his speech-writers –  of plagiarism. He can leave that to his veep, who notoriously plagiarized a speech by the British Labor Party leader, Neil Kinnock. 

What we want to point out is this: the Wind of Change that blew through Africa was an ill wind that brought no African country much good. Barely a single one is more prosperous than in Macmillan’s day, even among the few that became more democratic.  In sheer numbers, far more Africans are exposed now to civil war, invasion, oppressive government and profound impoverishment than in the 1960s.  Some populations have experienced, or are even at present experiencing, genocide; some, massacre on a vast scale; some, in considerable numbers, actual starvation.  

 One can only hope that Obama’s Wind of Change is not the same wind. 

Why did this article by Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov (in Front Page Magazine on October 10) not surprise me?

It is about a US delegation to the Soviet Union, of which one of the Soviet officials noted:

 

This time, the [US] delegation did not officially raise the issue of human rights during the negotiations. Biden said he did not want ‘to spoil the atmosphere with problems which are bound to cause distrust in our relations.’ However, during the breaks between the sessions the senators passed to us several letters concerning these or those ‘refuseniks’.

 

Unofficially, Biden and Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for ‘human rights’. They must prove to their voters that they are ‘effective in fulfilling their wishes’. In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

 Dennis Prager examines what Obama actually said in Berlin and finds ignorance, distortion and naivete. 

For instance:

Obama: "Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin."

 In his attempt to exaggerate the role of Berlin before his large Berlin audience, Obama made a claim that simply makes no sense. "Berlin stood in the way" of another World War beginning? How? If anything, Berlin was the flash point of East-West tension and therefore could have triggered a war.

Read the whole excellent comment here.     

 The visits of Barack Obama and two other senators to Afghanistan and Iraq, brief as they were, may have had some point to them. But It’s hard to discern the purpose of letting this posturizing, gum-chewing, know-nothing-done-nothing egotist cavort round three European capitals, declaiming his empty rhetoric and acting as if he were President of the United States. One wonders why President Sarkozy was willing to play a ceremonious part in the charade. Has the little trip given Obama valuable experience of the world so that he can formulate wise foreign policy? These crazy theatrics should be an embarrassment to the Democrats, and would be if the Party as a whole weren’t so far gone in craziness as even to think of putting up such a fellow for the office of president.  He has done nothing for his country. His associates have been criminals, terrorists, slum-developers, Communists, hate-preachers. When one remembers the great men of extraordinary achievement and ability, and  high probity, like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Reagan to whom they now propose that this fellow could be a successor, one can scarcely believe such a degeneration of values can have come about. Will voters wake up in time from the strange mad dream into which the sonorous speechifying of this lightweight politician has lulled many of them, and save their country and the world from the irreversible disaster that his election would bring?