Lieberman is encouraging indeed.

Submitted by Bernie (United States), Apr 3, 2009 at 15:54

Let me give you the opinion of Eric Voegelin:

"Gnostic societies and their leaders will recognize dangers to their existence when they develop, but such dangers will not be met by appropriate actions in the world of reality. They will rather be met by magic opertions in the dream world such as disapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to opinion of mankind, brfanding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government etc. The intellectual and moral corruption which expresses itself in the aggregate of such magic operations may pervade a society with the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, as we experience it in our time in the Western crisis."

Lieberman has signified that he will drop those policies based on dream assumptions "about the nature of man, about a mysterious evolution of mankind toward peace and world order, about the possibility of establishing an international order in the abstract without relation to the structure of the field of existential forces, about armies being the cause of war and not the forces and constellations which build them and set them in motion. Let us now hope that the Israeli government will now drop the "pathological substitution of the dream world" for reality.

The words of Voegelin were written in the early fifties in his book "The New Science of Politics" (pages l70-l72). They refer to the liberal democracies of the l930's. The syndrome then pro[phesied a coming war. What will it take to shake theGnostic societies (liberal democracies) of the West out of their dreamworld?

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".