[National Review] An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.
My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her "how dare you" complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon dioxide emissions.
Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of carbon dioxide will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.
In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union’s line that the march of global Communism would "bury" the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.
If the West is guilty of carbon crimes, racism, and bigotry, what are China and Iran? Woke elites prefer not to say.
An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.
Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.
My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her "how dare you" complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon dioxide emissions.
Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of carbon dioxide will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.
In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union’s line that the march of global Communism would "bury" the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.
Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its "soft power" were declared preferable to the reactionary United States
By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries, and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.
Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like reeducation camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public-health crises, and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.
After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU, and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.
The U.S. and Europe are often quite critical of violence against women, minorities, and gays. The European Union, for example, has often singled out Israel for its supposed mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.