Mark Steyn National Post
What have we learned since September 11th? We've learned that poverty breeds despair, despair breeds instability, instability breeds resentment and resentment breeds extremism.
Yes, folks, these are what we in the trade call "root causes." Which cause do you root for? "Poverty breeds instability" (The Detroit News)? Or "poverty breeds fanaticism" (Carolyn Lochhead in The San Francisco Chronicle)? Bear in mind that "instability breeds zealots" (John Ibbitson in The Globe And Mail), but that "fanaticism breeds hatred" (Mauve MacCormack of New South Wales) and "hatred breeds extremism" (Mircea Geoana, Romanian Foreign Minister)...
| Faced with the enormity of September 11th the pacifist left has done what it always does -- smother the issues in generalities and abstractions. |
And so faced with the enormity of September 11th the pacifist left has done what it always does -- smother the issues in generalities and abstractions -- though never on such an epic scale. On that sunny Tuesday morning, at least 7,000 people died -- real, living men and women and children with families and street addresses and telephone numbers. But the language of the pacifists -- for all its ostensible compassion -- dehumanizes these individuals. They're no longer flight attendants and firemen and waitresses and bond dealers, but only an abstract blur in some theoretical equation -- if not mere "collateral damage," certainly collateral. Of course, real live folks die in the Middle East, too, and their stories are worth telling. But in between the bonehead refrains of this breeding that and that breeding the other you'll search in vain for a name or a face, a street or a city or sometimes even a country. Just the confident assertion that one abstract noun breeds another. |