ninme

Western Standard - Terms of Surrender
When ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ become sinister concepts, we’re lost for more than words, by Mark Steyn

The other day, the Toronto Star, by one of those fortuitous strokes, came into the possession of an internal report commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Apparently, the department spent $76,000 on conducting focus groups to help the government under-stand”Canadian attitudes and feelings” toward the Afghanistan mission. …

Foreign Affairs had hired a public relations firm with a much sounder grasp of the kind of public relations positioning you need so that the citizenry won’t suspect that it’s a lot of public relations positioning. Among the “vocabulary/terms/phrases/concepts to reinforce” the Afghan policy, the Strategic Counsel recommended ditching discredited Bush neo-con cowboy fetishes like “freedom” and replacing them with the following: “hope,” “opportunity,” “enhancing the lives of women and children,” “rebuilding,” “restoring,” “reconstruction,” read ‘em and weep. The Strategic Counsel also recommended to Foreign Affairs that they “avoid developing a line of argumentation too strongly based on values. While the value of human rights is strongly supported, there is a risk of appearing to be imposing Canadian values. Again, this is not seen to be the ‘Canadian way.’”

I’ll say. The chief Canadian value is that we don’t accord our values any higher value than anybody else’s values. Except the Americans’ values, of course. And, if Bush and Cheney persist in talking up “freedom,” “democracy” and “liberty,” it’s no wonder such words poll negatively in the Great White North, to the point where they’ve joined “motherhood” and “apple pie” on the list of sinister alien philosophies. If I were one of our boys out in the Hindu Kush, I think I’d find this a little disheartening. Shortly before his sudden departure last year, I had a conversation in Washington with Donald Rumsfeld about the variable quality of America’s “allies”–the sort of thing I’ve mentioned here before: NATO members who agree to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Yanks in Afghanistan as long as they’re not in a combat role and there are at least two provinces between their shoulders and the Yankee shoulders. Secretary Rumsfeld was careful to distinguish between these token allies prepared to man the photocopier back at barracks if you invest two years of diplomatic energy in sweet-talking them, and real allies doing tough and useful things, into which category he put the Canadians. How terribly disheartening that, at a time when our troops are doing grown-up work in Afghanistan, we’re only prepared to support them if it can be passed off under weedy milquetoast generalities like “hope” and “opportunity.”…

If it’s any consolation, I’d wager this isn’t merely a Canadian problem. Since Bush started going around saying, “Freedom is the desire of every human heart” apropos Iraq and Afghanistan, blue-state America and the British left and assorted Continental intellectuals seem to have downgraded the word from a universal value to a strictly local phenomenon of no general application. …

So, if the Princess Pats happen to find themselves in Afghanistan, it’s hardly surprising we have a tough time figuring out what they’re there for. In the old days, they’d have been fighting for Queen and country. But, needless to say, the Strategic Counsel wouldn’t even bother running the numbers on words like those: they’d poll somewhere between George W. Bush and the Ebola virus. Yet, if “freedom” and “democracy” are no longer acceptable and even “Canadian values” like “human rights” are believed to be an “imposition,” what’s left? What words do work?

Sigh.