Whence Goes the Middle East?

I'm going to say this very frankly. We are wasting our time trying to force "democracy" on the despotisms of the Middle East.

They don't want it, and it's an insult to the lives of our brave young people that they're being sent over there to be maimed or killed for it. Of course our troops, for the most part, probably believe fervently in the cause of freedom in this region. And perhaps, someday, it will come. But it shows no sign of arriving at the point of a gun.

How do we transform this barren land? Free enterprise will achieve what militarism never will. Once business comes, and with it jobs, the angry young men who aggravate the unrest there will be too busy making their own and their families' lives better to have any more time for mayhem.

Of course, in the meantime, terrorism seems to stand in the way. Again, the way to dry up their recruiting is to give these guys real jobs to do. They are unhappy, in the first place, because they have no gainful employment and too much time on their hands. What about the hard-core terrorist organizations that seem dedicated to setting up an Islamist society? Well, don't they have to eat, just like everybody else?

All religions turn ugly in times of fear. What causes the fear? Societal unrest, for the most part -- which, in turn, is caused by the poverty that comes from joblessness. Democracy will only come about as the by-product of a free market. That may not sound sufficiently noble-minded to some people, but it is true.

The Christianist theocracy of the Far Right in America has enjoyed a surge of power primarily because of the fact that the United States is now a socialist state. How ironic that so many on the Right believe themselves to be anti-socialist! Once they got themselves some long-term power, look what they did with it: they built a socialist state! It may be Right-Wing socialism (the real name of the Nazi Party, remember was the National Socialists), but it is every bit as redistributionist and ultimately totalitarian as anything the Left has ever devised.

Socialism cannot succeed unless the state is remade into a totalitarian regime. Its centrally-planned rigors are never succesfully implemented in a free society. And no theocracy can long survive in a truly free-market system. The fact that socialism has not yet completely taken over in the United States is the only thing keeping the Christianist Right from completely ruling the land.

Well, gee whiz. George W. Bush has done more to turn this country in a socialist direction than any president since F.D.R. AND he has the backing of the Religious Right, to which he is trying his damnedest to turn over the entire nation. If you think these two circumstances are simply a coincidence, then I've got some heavenly swamp land in Florida to sell you.