In a 5-4 decision announced October 21, the United States Supreme Court decided that it is not unconstitutional to execute murderers for offenses committed while they were not yet 18. Whatever one thinks of the merits of this decision, it once again illustrates the validity of the Upinsky Principle: in government, majority rule means the rule of one. On the one hand, it seems to us that the majority of five probably did right, inasmuch as in the case in question, state courts and juries had already found the convicted young person guilty of first-degree murder; in other words, those lesser entities had already examined the details of the charge and concluded that the convicted killer deserved to be killed in turn. Surely the authors of the United States Constitution and its amendments did not intend to bar such an implementation of justice. Whether murdering juveniles should be executed once they attain maturity is a question that really ought to be left up to the legislatures. If the vote had been 4-5 instead of 5-4, "evolving standards of decency" would have prevailed over older legislative jurisprudence.

Let us for a moment imagine that in this case the vote had gone the other way and that five justices had made "evolving standards" the law. This would make them the judges not of the Constitution and the law, but of society, its "standards," whatever they might be, and of social evolution. If they could be joined by one more equally gifted judge of societal fashions, the presently frustrated minority of four – Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer, in the order of their ascent to the High Bench – would be replacing what Chief Justice Holmes called "firm constitutional guarantees"1 with the rule of "What’s happenin’ now." The fact that four eminent justices can complain that such "evolving standards" have not yet come to rule in every case is one more illustration of the rootlessness of our judicial system as it has evolved (that word again!) over the last three-quarters of a century. It is no wonder that the courts so dislike the Ten Commandments, which do not seem to be "with it" as far as evolving standards are concerned. The same reason explains their dislike for natural law. So far no judge has ventured to think that we can abolish any of the laws of nature, such as the law of gravity, the conservation of momentum, the speed of light, but they feel very free to disregard natural law in human relations and to replace it with their own judgment.

While natural law as such does not require belief in a Creator, it is very compatible with it. Thus the pagan Marcus Tullius Cicero, speaking of such law, said, "It is a sin to change it, and it is impossible to abolish it completely." Christianity took us beyond paganism, offering improvements such as the command to love one’s neighbor. Now the new principle of "evolving standards," abandoning both "the laws of nature and of nature’s God," is taking us back behind paganism to a more savage state. That a principle is seen as a tradition virtually disqualifies it in our eyes, for as we have moved along the calendar beyond the centuries when a tradition was established, we assume that we have progressed, that we have evolved socially, if not biologically, beyond those who went before. We no longer recognize even a shred of the wisdom of the ancients, except, of course, for the Founding Fathers (or Persons, if you prefer) in giving us a set of rules amenable to whatever changes we may desire. We have the liberty to alter or abolish laws as we please (except, perhaps, for such things as the law of gravity and the speed of light). Can "evolution" produce that which is worse instead of better, a kind of devolution? And how "standard" are our evolving standards when they are affirmed or rejected on the basis of a single "swing vote" in the Supreme Court?

Not all courts throughout the world are yet so advanced as ours. A report has just come in that in South Africa, no longer ruled by the white minority, Tascoe De Reuck has been condemned for the production of pornography, including child pornography, despite the claim of his defense that it is socially healthful. Apparently South African judges, like the Nigerian Anglican bishops who do not approve of homosexuality, have not yet come into concordance with evolving standards.

In late October a neighborhood theater in Moscow was seized by about 40 armed Chechen rebels and several hundred people are being held as hostages as these lines are being written. The terrorists demand independence for Chechnya, an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation. What will the Russian government do? It is hard to imagine that it will agree to what the terrorists have demanded, for to do so would indicate that a small number of criminals can successfully manipulate a great power and force it to change a determined government policy and agree to the amputation of national territory.

The most recent terrorist drama in America was caused by only one, the "Beltway sniper," since captured. It was not possible to protect against the ongoing danger that this murderer and his accomplice created, because they shot from concealment against targets of opportunity selected apparently at random, or at any rate with no common features. They did not belong to a class for whom special measures of protection or prudence could be adopted: young, old, rich, poor, black, and white. It is different with the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Measures have already been taken, reducing the possibility of a second series of explosive hijackings to virtually zero. The possibility that still more aircraft will be hijacked can perhaps even be eliminated altogether by the expedient of putting armed air marshals on every flight. But what can be done to forestall assaults like that of 40 armed terrorists on a crowded theater filled with unarmed people? Could armed guards be provided for every theater, sufficient in strength to forestall an attack by 40 terrorists? Surely not, unless we create a totally militarized police state, and perhaps not even then.

There is an answer, a modest proposal, namely, to implement throughout the population the principle of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the one that says, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Gun control enthusiasts in the United States interpret the first clause in the sentence, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state," as a limitation: weapons are to be made available only for an organized militia, which today means for the National Guard, an arm of the state and also, at the President’s desire, of the national government. Let us not examine the logic or illogic of that particular limitation, but simply assume that it is incorrect and that the amendment means what it sounds like it means, namely, that every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms. If such a rule had been in force in Russia and advantage of it had been taken, a theater with 800 guests might have had several hundred armed men and possibly even armed women in the audience, some of whom would have military training or even be active or former members of the huge police forces that characterized the Soviet Union. The 40 terrorists would have immediately been not the masters, but the targets. No doubt theater-goers would also be wounded and killed, but in such a situation the terrorists would surely go down under the guns of so many enraged citizens. Even if one or more terrorists had exploded a suicide bomb, in the worst case destroying the building and killing everyone in it, they clearly would fail in their objective. After such an encounter, they would be immensely less likely to find imitators than the present terrorists, whose control of the theater was wrested from them by a military assault.

Even as these pages were going to the press, Russian special troops stormed the building, finding 50-odd rather than 40 terrorists as originally reported, killing all of them, as well as over 100 hostages (about 12 percent of those present). The raid, under the circumstances, was very successful. Apparently the troops made use of some kind of gas to numb the terrorists (and also the hostages), supposedly not a poisonous one. If our suggestion had been in force and two or three hundred of the theater-goers had been carrying good pistols, perhaps more of them would have been killed. Nevertheless, for all of the Russians concerned it might have seemed nobler to die fighting than to have been shot by terrorists while unarmed or killed accidentally in a fight between the terrorists and the troops. The terrorists claimed to be willing to commit suicide if necessary. Would dying in a hail of small-arms fire from enraged would-have-been hostages make the kind of impression on the Russian government and the world that they hoped to make by their own murderous suicides?

Does this make sense? Many will charge that it could turn a theater visit into something like the shootout at the O.K. Corral, so often evoked as a specter of what will happen if large numbers of citizens go about armed, as the gun control enthusiasts fear. It is hardly likely that this suggestion to arm theater-goers will be taken seriously in our huge democracy. This illustrates the point brought out by the 17th-century writer Johannes Althusius, that when the commonwealth becomes too large, it becomes hard to solve its problems. One may venture to suggest that if such a hostage-taking occurred once in little Switzerland, where every man has been in the army and has a military weapon at home, the perpetrators would have been killed and any second hostage-taking project would be stopped before it could begin.

In our own giant nation, people are not expected to protect themselves; the State does it for them. A little bit of arithmetic will elucidate the problem. On the one hand the State cannot hire enough police to match up to the possibility of an invasion by 40 or so terrorists in any and every suburban theater. On the other hand, is any terrorist band numerous enough to seize a theater with one or two hundred armed men and women, perhaps more, in the audience?

During the hunt for the Beltway sniper, whose dozen or so victims caused more terror in our massive nation than do the frequent terrorists, acts in Israel, gun enthusiasts immediately called for more controls on weapons. Montgomery County Police Chief Moose exulted, after the terrorist suspects were captured, "The weapon is off the street." If only the weapon had been seized, does anyone think that the terrorist could not possibly have or find other weapons? Surely in this case it was not the fact that "guns kill," but rather that he, one enraged man, was running amok against his detested fellow-Americans. In the case of the sniper, it would have been of no use for the victims to have been surrounded by gun-carrying citizens. In the Moscow theater, by contrast, the presence of a couple of hundred armed citizens – veterans, police, and ordinary civilians – might not have prevented the first hostage-taking, but it would have caused a different outcome and probably warned against imitation.

There seem to be no lessons to be learned from the Beltway sniper incidents. There is no police force powerful enough to protect us from the frenzy of one man running amok, and personal handguns would usually be useless. Not all dangers are alike, however. Perhaps the seizure of the Russian theater may cause us to reflect on the fact that there are some things from which no army or police protection can secure us, and where it might well make better sense for society to return to some of the customs supposedly once protected by the Second Amendment.

In 1989, prompted by the demise of Soviet communism and the fall of the Soviet empire of client states and allies, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History. In that book, Fukuyama argues that all of human history over the past several centuries has been marked by progress toward democratic polity and capitalist economy. He also observes that there appears to be no further stage in development beyond these: having passed through monarchy and feudalism (and in many cases, fascism or communism) and arrived finally at democratic capitalism, human society has no higher structure toward which to evolve. It is not that there are no more historical events. It is that there is no more opportunity for real progress, and thus, history has reached its "end."

Since its publication was provoked by the collapse of a large portion of the worldwide Marxist movement, it is ironic that Fukuyama’s analysis appears so strongly influenced by Marxism. The evolutionary model of society was suggested by Marx, and the myth of inevitable human Progress has long been a favorite on the Left generally. The materialism of Fukuyama’s model, however, is its most important Marxist feature. "History," for Fukuyama, appears to be reducible to the story of the arrangements of human wealth and power. The simplicity of such reductionism allows the deduction of Fukuyama’s provocative thesis, but if such reduction is illegitimate, schemes based on it will be erroneous. If the history of mankind cannot meaningfully be reduced to the movement of capital and the exercise of power, as Marx suggested and as Fukuyama assumes, then Fukuyama’s analysis is incomplete, and his assertion that history has ended is really baseless.

Theories of history should be able to explain, or at least cope with, a few salient historical events. Naturally, therefore, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a stream of critics stepped forward to pronounce the death of the Fukuyama thesis about history and its putative end. One alternative, already urged in 1993 by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations, and now widely championed for obvious reasons, denies that the world is progressing toward the worldwide democratic-capitalism that Fukuyama predicts, but instead foresees a global "clash of civilizations" among six or seven cultural groups, chief among them a democratic bloc led by the United States facing an opposing radical Islamic alliance.

The plausibility of the Huntington alternative and the events of 9/11 led Fukuyama last autumn to defend his views in a column in The Wall Street Journal. There he reaffirmed his belief in the inevitability of global progress toward democracy and the free market, comparing the two to "a very powerful freight train that will not be derailed."

Despite this avowal of confidence, in his Journal article Fukuyama addresses himself to the civilization question in a manner which seems critically to weaken his "end of history" pronouncement. Specifically, he concedes that "liberal democracy and free markets do not work everywhere. They work best in societies with certain values." This is fatal to his talk of the end of history, because it concedes that the advance of democracy and capitalism will falter in the absence of civilizations amenable to them. As long as civilizations unsuitable for democracy and free markets persist, Fukuyama’s assumption that democracy and free markets will triumph in the end must be treated as suspect. Thus, not only has history not ended (as Fukuyama conceives the ending), but that end is not even in sight. Moreover, since Fukuyama has left out of his reckoning the story of competing civilizations, which would seem to constitute an important aspect of history, his whole analysis would appear to be rather oversimplified.

The problem posed to the Fukuyama theory by the apparent importance of civilizations is especially pronounced with regard to Islam, even without the events of 9/11 factored in. Islam is identified by Huntington as the leading opponent of the advance of freedom in politics and in the marketplace. The Islamic world, it so happens, is also possibly the best current demonstration of the centrality of religion to a civilization. Perhaps not coincidentally, religion and religious conflict are an aspect of history also neglected by Fukuyama.

Although Fukuyama ignores religion per se as an element of history in his book, in his Journal article he recognizes its importance for human political and economic life, which it will be recalled are the two elements with which he sums up history. He writes:

Liberal democracy and free markets do not work everywhere. They work best in societies with certain values whose origins may not be entirely rational. It is not an accident that modern liberal democracy first emerged in the Christian west, since the universalism of democratic rights can be seen as a secular form of Christian universalism.

This observation alone suggests that history cannot be reduced to politics and economy as Fukuyama implies in his book. The values of society seem to be a third component of history, perhaps specifically religious values.

This is confirmed by Fukuyama’s contrasting assessment of Islamic civilization. Whereas Christian culture historically has fostered liberal democracy and free markets, by marked contrast and in tacit agreement with Huntington, Fukuyama writes:

There does seem to be something about Islam, or at least the fundamentalist versions of Islam that have been dominant in recent years, that makes Muslim societies particularly resistant to modernity [i.e., democracy and free markets]. Of all contemporary cultural systems, the Islamic world has the fewest democracies (Turkey alone qualifies), and contains no countries that have made the transition to developed nation status in the manner of South Korea or Singapore.

So much for "the end of history." Although it is gratifying to see democracy and free economies spreading over the globe as they have, it seems clear, even to Fukuyama, that a much more fundamental struggle, at the level of civilization, is still going on, and with no obvious end in sight. Moreover, it is evident that any adequate theory of history will have to assess religion along with politics and economy, and this Fukuyama’s book does not do. Fukuyama attempts to save his theory by predicting that the attractions of free societies will in the end prove too great for Islamic civilization to resist. He believes that both time and might are on the side of the West, and in the closing sentence of his Journal article, he even appeals to the "U.S. will to prevail" (Don Rumsfeld, please call your office). By this point in his argument, he appears already to have forgotten that freedom in politics and economy can only flourish when certain values are taken for granted, values nurtured in (what long was) Christendom, but choked back under Islam. It may be doubted whether "U.S. will" can do anything about that.

The End of History–Postponed Due to Lack of Interest, Part II

In his justly famous book, The End of History (1989), Francis Fukuyama proposed that the progress of mankind over the last few centuries toward democracy and free market economy was rapidly, and inexorably, drawing to its close. The notion of history’s "end" arose from his contention that beyond political and economic freedom, there were no more meaningful developments to look for in politics and economics. These are the endpoints of historical development, the final maturation of human society, and basically the world is about there. With the end of the Cold War and the fall of Soviet communism, the fat lady had begun to sing.

In the previous part it was argued firstly that democracy and free markets, while important, are by themselves inadequate indices of history, and secondly, that a better model of history would put less stock in the supposedly inevitable advance of political and economic freedom and give greater consideration to the competition and conflict between civilizations. It was also suggested that perhaps the key element in any civilization is its religious makeup, making religion a third key index of history. This led, in turn, to consideration of Islamic civilization as not only the civilization that today best exhibits its religious underpinning, but also as the most unlikely theater in which one might hope to witness the blossoming of democracy.

The opposition between Islam and liberty is serious enough to warrant suspicion that they are fundamentally irreconcilable. So accustomed have we become to hearing our leaders extol the virtues of Islam (astoundingly, this has become much more prevalent after the September 11, 2001 attacks) that remarks by Francis Fukuyama in an essay in the Wall Street Journal last autumn on the subject of Islam can seem terribly politically incorrect. Fukuyama writes that while America and the West indeed have their opponents everywhere, including within their own societies, "Islam, by contrast, is the only cultural system that seems regularly to produce people like Osama bin Laden or the Taliban who reject modernity [democracy and free markets] lock, stock, and barrel. This raises the question of how representative such people are of the larger Muslim community, and whether this rejection is somehow inherent in Islam."

Furthermore, we in the West must remind ourselves that while Christianity has from time to time received political expression, Islam is fundamentally political in a way that may be difficult for Christians to comprehend. The separation of church and state, a topic for debate in the West and at least at some level taken for granted in the New Testament, is incomprehensible to Islam; the inner logic of Islam demands its politicization. At the risk of executing caricatures, the basic thrusts of Christianity and Islam might be compared by saying that whereas Christianity can often seem to focus narrowly on what a person believes, leaving behavior somewhat on the periphery, Islam can seem to focus on what a person does, leaving personal disposition, or belief, less emphasized. The cardinal expressions of Christianity are statements of faith; the (usually) five pillars of Islam are all actions, or even activities. Activities are enforceable by the state in a way that beliefs never can be, and Islam has always sanctioned its own political enforcement. When we are reminded that "islam" can be translated as "peace," or "submission," it should be remembered that the peace in question is not some inner peace, it is the bringing of people’s lives into conformity with the will of Allah. For such a purpose one may, and should, employ any means necessary.

Islam, therefore, from its very inception, was an emphatically political movement. It expanded not as a church or a synagogue, but as an empire, ruled by the caliph.2 In the West, many have observed how wherever a Muslim community takes root, very soon the impulse arises to form a Muslim state (or perhaps some other lesser form of Muslim political expression). This is demonstrated in Turkey, constitutionally a western-style democracy, where the political establishment is locked in endless struggle with organized Islam. This point could be greatly expanded upon, but suffice it to say that a central requirement for liberty, which is that the state "let go" its control of political, economic, and religious life, is a requirement that will always be difficult for Islam to accept.

If democratic rule and free markets are good indices of history, as Fukuyama claims (and they probably are though not exclusively so), then the role of civilizations in fostering or denying these things is an extremely important force within history. Moreover, it can be argued that the character of a civilization is formed largely, or perhaps chiefly, by its religion. This certainly seems to be true of today’s Islamic world, which is fundamentally hostile not only to the religious character of the West (whatever that may now be), but also to its political and economic character. Such fundamental opposition suggests that we are indeed faced with a clash of civilizations that may persist for quite a long time, perhaps with punctuations of violence. Moreover, while Westerners may not perceive the clash as a religious war, that is no hindrance to the opposition viewing it (perhaps more accurately) in those terms, with all the extremes of passion and commitment that such a conflict is capable of arousing.

Plainly, we can safely banish any sense of complacency about the inevitable advance of liberty across the world. Another moral rises closer to home. Fukuyama’s recognition (and he is not the first, just perhaps the most recently influential) of the importance of "certain values" to political and economic freedom has important implications as the Christian West, where democratic freedom blossomed, becomes more and more the post-Christian West. Political and economic liberty did not advance where the values they required were not present, which suggests that the erosion of those values will stimulate the retreat of those liberties. The moral is that liberty probably cannot be preserved by merely ad hoc struggle, fought court case by court case. What is required is the preservation, and in some cases the restoration, of Christian conceptions of God, man, and the world. While there seems little chance of an Islamic takeover of the West anytime soon, the Western jettisoning of even biblical theism, let alone Christianity, is a present reality, and the effects are going to be felt in the steady surrender of liberty in all our daily lives. –J.D.L.

One of the difficulties that we face in the United States, not the largest or most populous nation in the world, but the richest and militarily by far the strongest, is that the impact of any mistake made by our government affects fifty states, more than a quarter of a billion people, and frequently much of the rest of the world as well. When a problem arises somewhere in this vast domain, for example the brutal murder of a young "gay" man in Wyoming, multiple murders in a Colorado school, a flood or an earthquake, local authorities are not trusted to be able to deal with it. A flood or an inordinately heavy snowfall creates cries for the affected region to be made "a federal disaster area." No comparable possibility exists for a small country, like Switzerland, where a massive avalanche cannot cause the nation to be declared a disaster area. Not even a relatively large, rich nation like Germany can look all over the world for assistance after the summer floods of 2002. But sometimes being a little nation has its advantages. When a solution to an ongoing problem is proposed, there is no need to try to meet the approval of a quarter-billion self-centered people. The people affected can try to do something about it themselves, without asking for the approval of half of the world.

The New Age Party

The little Baltic nation of Latvia, located on the Baltic Sea between Estonia and Lithuania, did something remarkable in the month of October. It elected the head of a newly formed party, Einar Repse, as prime minister. The small country speaks one of two surviving Baltic languages, Latvian; the other, slightly older Lithuanian, is the oldest living Indo-European tongue. With a population not exceeding that of Chicago and surroundings, Latvia has seldom been independent. In medieval times, it traded with the German Hanseatic League and was for a time under one of the German crusading orders, the Knights of the Sword. It was subsequently Polish, then Swedish, finally Russian from 1721. Thanks to the influence of the Germans and the Swedes, it became and remained Lutheran, unlike heavily Roman Catholic Lithuania to the South.

After the Bolshevik revolution, Latvia enjoyed national independence for the first time in history, from 1919 until the U.S.S.R. occupied it, together with the other two Baltic nations, as part of Stalin’s short-lived deal with Hitler. During World War II, it was briefly "liberated" by the German army, and many Latvians volunteered to help the Germans, some ignominiously collaborating in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The return of the Russians in 1945 made it a Communist "republic," a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which it remained until the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991 permitted it to regain its coveted independence.

Early in 2002, Mr. Repse, who had resigned as director of the state bank because of disagreements with the right-wing prime minister, founded a new party, the New Age. During the election campaign later that year, he and other party leaders took an oath in the Lutheran Cathedral of Riga, in the presence of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic archbishops and the Orthodox metropolitan, to "Serve the Lord Christ in working for Latvia and her people." The goal of the party is to work for a renewal of Christianity in the nation after forty-odd years of official atheist rule.

Approximately 31 percent of Latvians list no religion, twenty-three percent are Lutherans, 22 percent Roman Catholic, and 19 percent Orthodox. With the addition of the smaller Christian bodies, the total percentage of Christians in Latvia is about 65. In the United States, about four-fifths of the people belong to one or another of the multiple Christian bodies. Can we imagine any candidates for any office, much less the highest in the land, making an election promise to serve the Lord Christ by working for America and her people? Our understanding of the First Amendment and the sacred doctrine of the Separation of Church and State forbids it. Still, if one takes both the amendment and Mr. Repse’s promise literally, there is no actual contradiction. Serving Christ while working for the people does not establish a religion; in fact, every individual who takes seriously the sovereignty of God, or in this case of the Son, should look on his labor for the good of the people as service to God. Even in secular America today, that may well be the case, especially with the godlier Christians and Jews, but no one dare say it.

In the run-up to the 2002 mid-term elections, several candidates showed an incredible blindness on issues that literally mean life and death for millions of Americans born and yet unborn. Homosexual activists continue to get their way– the American Association of Family Practice joined the pediatricians in stating that homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt. By now everyone ought to know that homosexual behavior, even with condoms, is a very effective way of spreading many "sexually transmitted" diseases, especially but not only the dreaded and fatal acquired immune deficiency disorder known as AIDS. Bringing adopted children into a male homosexual "family," in addition to the fact that it will give the growing children a somewhat eccentric set of experiences, may well subject them to the early death of a parent from AIDS. Regularizing homosexual relationships by assimilating them into the traditional pattern of the family certainly runs up against the famous ethical maxim of Immanuel Kant, "Act on the principle that you could wish to see universally applied," a kind of philosophical expansion of the Golden Rule, "Do as you would be done by." Democratic senatorial candidates in both North and South Carolina refused to comment on the what they may do, if elected, on the various issues of "gay rights."

Even less edifying was the position that they expressed on the policy that every year takes between one quarter and one third of America’s unborn children, abortion on demand. Unfortunately the wisdom of Kant as well as the teachings of the Bible and the principles of natural law are to a large extent forgotten in contemporary society, and when not forgotten, rejected. Even the aspect of abortion that ought to be an automatic prohibition, partial birth abortion, could not move Erskine Bowles to take any action that might seem to reject the absolute right of the woman to dispose of an unwanted child at any time in pregnancy. Mr. Bowles was quoted in the Charlotte Observer as saying that he believes partial birth abortion to be wrong, except when the mother’s life is in danger. Our Democratic stars seem unable to notice what the American Medical Association, reinforced by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, has said, namely, that there is no condition for which a partial birth abortion is the indicated therapy. Thus Mr. Bowles, after saying that he believes that at least partial birth abortion is wrong in general, said that he would vote against any attempt to ban it.

Anti-abortion activists have often tried, usually unsuccessfully, to liken abortion to slavery or to racism, in that it discriminates against a defenseless minority; in the case of slavery, of a race without civil right; of abortion, to a developing human being with no defender. Could Mr. Bowles or anyone else say, "I believe that racism is wrong, but I will vote against any laws to ban it?"

• In the night between October 24 and 25 the two suspected sniper murderers were arrested – yielding extra-large headlines in papers nationwide the next morning. The morning papers of October 26 had banner headlines, "TERRORISTS ARRAIGNED FOR MURDER." A side column reported that Russian special forces had stormed the occupied hotel in Moscow, killing or capturing most of the Chechen terrorists and incidentally costing the lives of over 100 of the hostages. This is another illustration of the intense self-fascination of the American media with what goes on in the United States. This reveals a kind of chronic nationalistic myopia which makes it next to impossible for average American people even to know, much less properly to evaluate, events of far more importance to the future of the world and thus of our own nation than the crimes or the capture of a Muslim terrorist American and his juvenile accomplice.

• In the month of October, as pressure on Israel grows, both the electronic and print media have reported, often rather crossly, that "fundamentalist" American Christians, particularly ones with dangerous apocalyptic ideas drawn from the Book of Revelation, are supporting Israel in word and deed. Inasmuch as both Protestant conservatives, as the media conceive them, and militant Israelis are held to be socially undesirable, when the two are wrapped together in the same apocalyptic blanket, they both look even worse. In the meantime, the media politically correctly close their eyes to the swelling menace of alienated Islamic populations growing increasingly hostile to non-Muslims, including Israelis, also to Jews elsewhere, and to the complacent Christian populations of the West.

• Mozart’s socially critical opera, The Marriage of Figaro, was first performed in 1786, in the interval between the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). At a recent performance in Charlotte, North Carolina, the acts took place on a stage between large representations of the two documents. Nothing better illustrates the malaise affecting our own society today than the difference between them. In our American Declaration, the emphasis is on our creation by God. Our rights are endowed by the Creator. The French Declaration assumes that these rights are somehow inherent in human nature. Its noble sentiments were soon to be mocked by the Reign of Terror. Revolutions against monarchical "tyranny," such as the French and Bolshevik revolutions, produced vastly more political prisoners than the monarchs they supplanted: at the time of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it contained only seven prisoners. The oppression of political dissidents by the Russian czar was multiplied many times by his Communist successors.

Notes on Sources

For "Another Little Country," see idea-Spektrum, October 26, p. 16. So far, no notice of these elections in the American media has come to my attention.

Footnotes

1 Earlier developments have already turned Justice Holmes’s concept of constitutional firmness into nothing more than a pious memory.

2 The true "first crusade" was not waged by medieval Christians, it was the holy war led by Mohammed himself against Mecca to bring about its submission to Islam. (Note the contrast with Jesus and Jerusalem.) At the end of his life, Mohammed was planning the invasion of Syria.