For my second post on the new site I want to write a little bit about "yearning for freedom" -- the concept behind much of President Bush's international policy and his vision for the future. Basically, he believes that everyone, from every culture, whether they know it or not, is imbued by God with certain unalienable rights that cannot be justly or morally violated. People who live in oppression yearn to be free and deserve to be free, regardless of lines drawn on maps or UN representation.
The rational counter to this position is pretty simple: look around -- there are plenty of oppressed people who don't appear to be yearning for freedom. There are many cultures that seem to be quite content with their repressive thugocracies. To that I say: maybe so! Maybe there are people who long for their kids to strap on bombs and blow up buses. Maybe they like their rulers to steal their wealth and spend it on fancy palaces. Maybe they like their princes to drive around, grab girls off the street, and rape them. Maybe they like flying planes into buildings. Maybe there are women who think burkas are the height of fashion and who adore genital mutilation... but guess what? They're wrong. They may not know it, but they're wrong.
Who am I to judge? What, are you telling me you'd trade your culture for theirs? Please. As the left loves to frequently intone, think of the children. Maybe the parents love it, but think of the children who have yet to be born, who will never have a chance to know anything else before they're brainwashed by evil. Would you send your litle boys and girls to live in Iran or Saudi Arabia? Not likely. Iraq and Afghanistan, however, and sure looking up.
So rather than get into some sort of existential debate over how we objectively judge the quality of various cultures, why notjust see how people vote with their feet? That's easy: everyone in the world want to come to America. Ergo, we have the superior culture, and the majority of the world agrees on that. They may not like everything about us, but given the choice the vast majority of the people would want to live here rather than wherever they are now. As the acknowledgedly superior culture, we can evaluate other cultures based on their similarity to us; given the unalienable rights granted to all mankind by God, we have a moral justification (if not a duty) to do what we can to reform cultures of evil and remake them for good.
