Nation’s fate is in its citizens’ hands
BY: Michael Mckenna for the Washington Times
With the disappearance of the Assad regime from Syria last week, the Middle East, shorn of its last secular state, returns again to what it was before the last couple of centuries of combined Anglo and American hegemony — a reservoir of religiosity and tribal preeminence and a standing rebuke to the hyper-rationalism of the Western “Enlightenment.”
More than a century’s worth of effort by the mightiest empires in history failed to impose a way of life on people, nations and tribes who did not and do not want to emulate the United States or, before that, Britain. Who can blame them? If your preferred way of life has to be exported at the barrel of a gun, what does that say about your way of life? The terrible truth is that the English-speaking world has much of which to be proud, but it has never quite accommodated itself to the fact that some people just are not interested in what it is selling.
