Ask Not For Whom The Nobel Tolls
Today’s WSJ correctly identified the motivations behind Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, there’s an element of hope, change, peace and all that unattainable nonsense. The real story is an end to American Exceptionalism.
What ideals are those [promoted by Obama]? Well, the Nobel citation declares that Mr. Obama’s “diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” Now, the world is a big place, much of it run by despots and crooks, each of whom gets the same vote in the U.N. General Assembly as America. The Europeans are applauding that at long last there is an American President willing to let himself and his country mingle as equals with this amorphous global “majority.”…
Mr. Obama sees the U.S. differently, as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world’s challenges, he emphasized yesterday, “can’t be met by any one leader or any one nation.” What this suggests to us—and to the Norwegians—is the end of what has been called “American exceptionalism.” This is the view that U.S. values have universal application and should be promoted without apology, and defended with military force when necessary.
Obama is the post-modernist, multiculturalist President. American greatness, in the left’s world view, isn’t something to be extolled but rather something to be apologized for. Any accomplishments, they argue, came at the expense of someone else. It is an attitude that is factually wrong to say nothing of wrong-headed.
Defending the country and western civilization against this attitude is one of the motivations behind this blog. The belief held by the multiculturalists that our civilization is rotten to the core and any other culture is at least as good (probably better) is a blight that I fear threatens to destroy us. How can a civilization that denies its accomplishments, refuses to defend itself and promotes values and behaviors hostile to it survive?