The Rawls Report
Is There A Gene for Appeasement?
by Alec Rawls
Opinions Staff

According to a poll conducted by KRON TV in San Francisco just one day after "liberation day" in Iraq, two-thirds of Democrats - just one-quarter of Republicans - fear that our victory in Iraq makes terrorist attacks more likely than before the war.

An evil dictator sitting on the world's second-largest oil reserves dominated Iraq; he used this wealth to develop weapons of mass destruction, giving them to terrorists so that they could kill as many Americans as possible. Yet somehow, the argument goes, removing him increases the threat of terrorism?

How can we account for such a bizarre cognition? My theory--there is a gene for appeasement.

Regardless of sense and reason, the exercise of power seems in itself to terrify many people. They only want to shrink from danger and lay low, as if some voice in their heads were telling them that this is the only way to remain safe. How else can we account for the third of the population (the two-thirds of the Democratic Party) who love America, who love the liberty we have here, who love the liberty for other peoples that America promotes in the world, yet who hate American power?

These are the same people who are terrified by the idea of having guns in their own homes. Their own empowerment scares them. Faced with violent threats, their instinctive reaction is to disarm, in effect, to give up, in hopes of surviving by assuming a non-threatening posture. It is obvious: they are genetic appeasers.

That in itself is okay. They have other contributions to make. The beauty of liberty is that it allows all of us to discover value in the world, seeking where we can make our greatest contributions and get rewarded for them. There is no imputation that genetic cowards are any less meritorious, on the whole, than anyone else.

The problem arises when they have power, either in government, the media, or in the universities, because in the modern world, appeasement is incredibly dysfunctional. We evolved from circumstances where power was individually founded and generally fleeting in length. The calculations of individual power that shape our psyches are not the calculations of state power, which we as a people are called upon to wield today.

For a society to lay low is for it to give up its interests in the world. For a society to do this when it is the most powerful -- and moral -- nation on Earth is insane.

The great accomplishment of western society has been to establish moral government, charged to protect fundamental principles of rights: the principles of individual liberty and the liberty of free peoples to choose their leaders. Limited government and democracy were the founding achievements of our Revolutionary War. Later, the great advance of equal protection was secured by our Civil War.

These moral achievements of American government have allowed liberty, the great engine of human progress, to flower, turning the protectors of liberty into the world's greatest power. It makes no sense for an overwhelmingly superior force such as ours to appease aggression.

Genetic appeasers simply cannot understand this. It does not square with the "safe direction" that they feel in their bodies. The Democratic left saw Jimmy Carter almost destroy the nation with his furious appeasement at the height of the Cold War, casting off American power like a Million Mom marcher getting rid of her guns: Iran to the Mullahs, Nicaragua to the communists, Angola to the Cubans, the Panama Canal to the Chinese, military retreat from the Soviets, et cetera ad nauseum. They saw how Reagan's vigorous confrontation of aggression facilitated the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Nicaragua. Yet, as Mona Charen has documented in her book Useful Idiots, they still hate American power and are still committed to appeasement. They literally cannot learn from their mistakes; their genes will not allow it.

The same phenomenon appears in the realm of ideas. The very idea that America could be moral is anathema to congenital appeasers, not because they think that America is immoral, but because they think that the idea of right and wrong is itself immoral.

The Democratic left locates its defense of liberty not in a theory of right, but in the claim that, since there is no such thing as right, no one can impose upon others in the name of right. It is a perfect mirror of their physical fear. Claims to right are abjured because they are a claim to moral justification and hence to power, and power is shunned. "Throw away your guns. Then we will be safe!"

The appeasers tried to stop us from winning the war. Now they are trying to stop us from winning the peace. Much of the Arab/Muslim world is submerged in a culture of lies. Iraq is full of thousands of young Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Libyans, Saudis, and Yemenis, who were told that the Americans had come to attack Islam, murder Arabs, and rape women. An Iraqi civilian was shown on the news pleading with coalition troops not to kill these men who had traveled from across the Middle East to fight for Saddam. "They came here to help us," he said, "they didn't know."

The appeaser's answer to the florid evil that deceives the Arabs masses about which side is in the right is to withdraw. They will never learn. Their mental equipment will not allow it, and so we must defeat them. We must stand firm in Iraq, first creating an interim government that examples civic virtue, then demanding a constitution that incorporates individual liberty, limited government, equal protection, freedom of political speech, religious tolerance, and the sovereignty of the people.

Just as important, however, we must confront and denounce lies against America and Israel and expose them as the slanderous incitements to murder that they are. All who partake of them willingly are moral criminals.

We embrace a Muslim world that demonstrates intellectual and moral integrity, but the cesspool that now engulfs Iraq, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt is an evil that must be named, every time it opens its ugly mouth. To appease in the realm of public opinion is no different from military appeasement.

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:22:46 MST.