If achieving world peace required torturing a single baby, asks a
character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers
Karamazov, would it be worth it?
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with
the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace
and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to
torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating
its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that
edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the
architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."
The liberalism that Barack Obama seeks to complete answers
Dostoyevsky's question with an emphatic yes. What is Obama's
abortion-on-demand-forever policy but the building of a modern
American way of life upon the graves of tortured babies? And not
just the unavenged tears of one baby but millions of them.
This week, however, Obama did avenge the tears of terrorists.
World peace, he said, isn't worth theirs. He lectured the CIA
that "What makes the United States special and what makes you
special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our
values and ideals even when it's hard."
Obama's prim pontifications about America's "values and ideals"
inspired Chris Matthews and Jack Cafferty, among other deep and
careful thinkers, to mull over the question: If torturing
terrorists works -- as the Obama administration had to admit
grudgingly this week -- is it okay? No, of course not, the
chattering class proudly concluded.
One wonders why. What do they care? Having already accepted
abortion and euthanasia -- which are nothing more than the
expedient killing of the unborn and the elderly -- why should the
expedient torture of terrorists, a lesser evil, trouble them? Oh,
that's right: the terrorists are guilty and the guilty under the
ministrations of modern liberalism never suffer. Pain in modern
life is for the innocent.
Terrorists, we're told by pro-abortion liberals, suffer
excruciating pain while the ejected unborn and euthanized elderly
feel nothing. And even if the latter do suffer pain, say these
liberals, that pain is worth it. After all, abortion and
euthanasia sustain a pleasant and peaceful lifestyle for the
strong. Let the dead bury the dead. Or, as the Supreme Court has
said, imagine the disruption to America's way of life if
stare decisis in the case of Roe v. Wade
disappeared and women couldn't plan their careers and futures
without the expectation of legal abortion for years to come.
Obama's liberalism is not an opponent of human rights abuses but
an embodiment of them. The CIA restricts itself to methods far
less ruthless than those permitted by the platform of the
Democratic Party. When will Obama bring his own platform into
line with the Geneva Accords?
It is a little late in the day for Obama to worry about America's
moral reputation. Resisting evil even "when it is hard"
hasn't interested liberalism for at least four decades. It rests
on an ideology of expedient evil and crass utilitarianism.
With St. Paul, Western civilization, before modern liberalism
ransacked it, said: "One may not do evil so that good may result
from it." But then modern liberalism came along and reversed the
formulation and now insists in the case of everything from
therapeutic cloning to killing unborn children to dehydrating the
elderly that one should do evil so that good may come from it.
Obama only now rediscovers the Christian ethic for terrorists,
even as he weaves the "fabric of human destiny" with the tissue
of tortured children.
topics:
Barack Obama, Abortion, Torture
