Victor Davis Hanson just might be my #1 idol. Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer, and Christopher Hitchens are close seconds… but Hanson’s words, to quote a smart lawyer… they are “beautifully simple and simply beautiful”.
The binary oppressor/victim narrative goes something like this: the United States for the last half-century—through its embrace of neocolonialism and imperialism, and then again through its birthing of globalized capitalism—is at fault for most of the mess outside the West.
We as the bad guys impose, dictate, exploit, ignore, and manipulate the more noble Other to such a degree that he is forced to lash out in understandable, though often dangerous ways.
This is a sort of all-inclusive worldview that in postmodern fashion pits those with “power” against those without it. And in such a simplistic bipolar world, only a few gifted Western elite intellectuals, of superior intelligence, empathy, and insight, can reach across the divide, understand the Other, and find common ground, by accommodating the West to alternate paradigms of politics, culture, and economic and social life…
Then something messy comes along that doesn’t fit the neat paradigm like the purple-finger elections in Iraq, Tiananmen Square, or the most recent democracy demonstrations in Iran that confound that easy calculus. Just when you are singularly prepared, in bold face-to-face diplomacy, to understand the historic grievances of an unshaved, Nehru-coated Ahmadinejad, and to make the necessary apologies and accommodations, thousands of Iranians hit the street in Levis, with English-lettered protest signs, hitting their cell-phones and chanting Western-like protests again indigenous Iranian theocratic fascism.
So how can it be, that anyone would wish to model their politics after Western-style free speech and consensual government, given our culpability for so many global pathologies? The even weirder result that follows is that we become skeptical of the pro-Western Columbian, Israeli, Iraqi—and Iranian—as somehow less “authentic” by the very fact of his good will to, and admiration of, us (contrary to everything one has been taught in post-colonial classes).
In that vein, Obama is almost more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners, whose grievances Obama has long studied (and perhaps in large part entertained), and whose estrangement alone offers opportunity for Obama’s sophisticated multicultural insight and singular narcissistic magnanimity.
via Again, Why the Diffidence? – Victor Davis Hanson – The Corner on National Review Online.