The holy peace process

All true religions have a sacred cult expressed in the form of a ritual that takes place, as Mircea Eliade wrote, outside ordinary time. In Christianity, it is the liturgy of the Eucharist. In the religion known as liberalism (and virtually all modern Western people are liberals), it is negotiations aimed at achieving “peace” between Israel and the Palestinians. Now that the U.S. is gearing up yet once again for another stab at a Mideast “peace” agreement (and the chances for an agreement have never been better, the media tells us—wow!), this may be a good moment to look at a blog entry from 2003, “The nightmare of the peace process returns.” It was written at the time when President Bush first betrayed his great, radical speech of June 2002 in which he had declared that he would not deal with the Palestinians any more until they had decisively given up their exterminationist intentions and their terrorist agitation and actions against Israel.

Another recent idea linking to that old discussion about Israel is Jacob M’s comment last week about how his understanding of contemporary conservatism has changed:

Also, before becoming a reader of VFR, I was a member of what you might call the “Bush is an evil genius” school of thought; the thinking that says that mainstream conservatives are always saying and doing things that appear to be liberal just to get their foot in the door of the mainstream debate, but once they have done so they will let slip the dogs of true conservatism. Thus, whenever George W. Bush expressed his compassionate conservatism by saying things like “When somebody hurts, government has got to move,” or when the pope would say that Christ’s work consists of liberation from all forms of discrimination, or when any number of mainstream conservatives would argue against affirmative action on the basis that it’s bad for black people, I would think, “Well, he has to say that, he has to do that.” I thought that all they were trying to do was win the sympathy of enough liberals to begin preaching and practicing true conservatism. It took a long time, but now I see that if one considers all of their words and all of their actions, it makes much more sense just to conclude that they actually believe what they’re saying; that is, that they have basically accepted the tenets of liberalism.

As Jacob points out, this is one of the great lessons conservatives can learn, freeing us from all kinds of illusions that keep us in thrall to liberalism. And an example of this lesson is how, back in 2003, I had been trying to see some clever “conservative” plan in Bush’s continuing pursuit of the peace process, and then I realized, no, he’s pursuing the “peace” process because he really believes in it. He’s not a conservative pretending to be a liberal—he’s a liberal. Just as, when Pope Benedict approvingly cites the 1965 Vatican statement Nostra Aetate saying that Christians are in solidarity with Muslims as fellow adorers of the one God, he’s not a conservative pretending to be a liberal—he’s a liberal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 19, 2007 05:13 PM | Send