Being too certain

Submitted by Helge Ogrim (Norway), Sep 11, 2006 at 15:38

Equating the present situation to the cold war, invites interesting questions (I think). Much can be said in favour of the conservative position, which Mr. Pipes calls confrontational.

The European tendency to compromise in the face of threat, is not immediately appealing. The alliance of pacifists and hard left supporters of freedom's enemies, deserved less sympathy and more resistance from the democratic center.

But can we confidentially conclude that that the positions taken by, say, Willy Brandt og Olof Palme in the seventies and eighties, seriously damaged the defence of freedom, as Pipes apparently implies? Or may historians 50 years from now, find that the "checks and balances" of confrontation and appeasement together narrowed the communist room for maneuver?

This is my problem with Mr. Pipes and like-minded, well-intentioned hardliners, of which even Scandinavia has a few. The toughness of their rethoric leaves little room for winning the minds of muslims for liberal democracy at exactly the time when this seems most pressing. It also seems to play too much into the hands of those who recruit fresh terrorists from a pool of disenchanted muslim youngsters in Europe.

The Brits have experienced terror for decades. Their stoicism in the face of danger and their politicians' search for practical answers to immediate and long term threats, embodied by prime minister Blair and others, seems more like an European recipie than the shillness of the loudest anti-islamists.

In August, I partook in Reason Magazine's conference in Amsterdam. Though highly entertaining and quite interesting, I found the American tone of voice somewhat disquieting. The seemingly limitless enthusiasm for scorning European sentiment, politics and institutions (esp. the EU), struck me as non-productive, even when I tended to agree. The feeling I experienced, may be similar to that which has led many here to conclude that American conservatives are lacking in their knowledge of Europe just as European critics of the US are lacking in their understanding of those they critisize.

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