Maybe the kiddies will learn something...
Farewell to Democracy
The price of politics in a society without virtue.
April 20, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
In the closing minutes of the film Moscow on the Hudson, Vladimir Ivanoff, a Soviet defector, sits in a New York coffee shop trying to make sense of the country he has come to. It is a free country, but the nature of its freedom appears both bewildering and destructive. The America he lives in has freedom, but no purpose. It often appears to be open to all the wrong things and none of the right ones. A place free of religion, of morality and of meaning, that offers mercantilism and hedonism, that allows individuals to lose themselves in a system that echoes with a freedom that is so vast as to be inhuman.
People from around the world are drawn to America by the idea of freedom. It is not difficult to envision what freedom is when you live under a dictatorship. Freedom becomes the opposite of tyranny. But the more complex question is what is freedom without the constant of tyranny? What happens when freedom is cheapened and when the founding principles of a nation are forgotten?
Those are among the subjects that author Alexander Maistrovoy explores in his book, Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger). Alexander Maistrovoy is no stranger to tyranny. But he finds himself a stranger in a West which has turned its back on its values and appears to be nihilistically embracing its own destruction at the hands of Islam and the radical left.
The world that Alexander Maistrovoy discovers is descending into totalitarianism, gripped by a senseless madness it abandons its values, forgets its past and embraces a chaotic hedonism that can never be equal to the full measure of its unhappiness. It is a world where human rights means tyranny and the tyranny of Islamic law means freedom, where dictators are heroes and democracy is a shell game.
As Maistrovoy writes, "The words 'democracy,' human rights,' 'social justice,' 'liberal values,' 'humanism,' 'freedom' and 'equality' rain down from all sides... they are repeated like a spell, a magic mantra, a prayer.” But the magic spell means nothing. Those using the words do not understand their meanings. Instead the invocation of lost principles becomes a cargo cult ritual that licenses destructive impulses. There is no mantra or spell that will transform Islamic law or leftist tyranny into liberal democracy. Instead the rituals and word games mask the scale and steepness of the descent.
Alexander Maistrovoy had already seen a society where religion was replaced by a utopian political creed that promised heaven on earth, but offered only lies, manipulation and tyranny. It is possible to create a democracy of cannibals, but such a society would merely democratize abuses. Likewise a society without laws is also a society without justice. Human rights organizations that deny the rights of the individual while focusing only on the group are not human and offer no rights.
...
If we are to recover virtue, then we must also recover the ideas that made virtue possible. And Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy offers a valuable contribution to the task of rediscovering not merely ideas or virtues, but the virtue of ideas and the idea of virtue.
Farewell to Democracy
Farewell to Democracy
The price of politics in a society without virtue.
April 20, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
In the closing minutes of the film Moscow on the Hudson, Vladimir Ivanoff, a Soviet defector, sits in a New York coffee shop trying to make sense of the country he has come to. It is a free country, but the nature of its freedom appears both bewildering and destructive. The America he lives in has freedom, but no purpose. It often appears to be open to all the wrong things and none of the right ones. A place free of religion, of morality and of meaning, that offers mercantilism and hedonism, that allows individuals to lose themselves in a system that echoes with a freedom that is so vast as to be inhuman.
People from around the world are drawn to America by the idea of freedom. It is not difficult to envision what freedom is when you live under a dictatorship. Freedom becomes the opposite of tyranny. But the more complex question is what is freedom without the constant of tyranny? What happens when freedom is cheapened and when the founding principles of a nation are forgotten?
Those are among the subjects that author Alexander Maistrovoy explores in his book, Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger). Alexander Maistrovoy is no stranger to tyranny. But he finds himself a stranger in a West which has turned its back on its values and appears to be nihilistically embracing its own destruction at the hands of Islam and the radical left.
The world that Alexander Maistrovoy discovers is descending into totalitarianism, gripped by a senseless madness it abandons its values, forgets its past and embraces a chaotic hedonism that can never be equal to the full measure of its unhappiness. It is a world where human rights means tyranny and the tyranny of Islamic law means freedom, where dictators are heroes and democracy is a shell game.
As Maistrovoy writes, "The words 'democracy,' human rights,' 'social justice,' 'liberal values,' 'humanism,' 'freedom' and 'equality' rain down from all sides... they are repeated like a spell, a magic mantra, a prayer.” But the magic spell means nothing. Those using the words do not understand their meanings. Instead the invocation of lost principles becomes a cargo cult ritual that licenses destructive impulses. There is no mantra or spell that will transform Islamic law or leftist tyranny into liberal democracy. Instead the rituals and word games mask the scale and steepness of the descent.
Alexander Maistrovoy had already seen a society where religion was replaced by a utopian political creed that promised heaven on earth, but offered only lies, manipulation and tyranny. It is possible to create a democracy of cannibals, but such a society would merely democratize abuses. Likewise a society without laws is also a society without justice. Human rights organizations that deny the rights of the individual while focusing only on the group are not human and offer no rights.
...
If we are to recover virtue, then we must also recover the ideas that made virtue possible. And Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy offers a valuable contribution to the task of rediscovering not merely ideas or virtues, but the virtue of ideas and the idea of virtue.
Farewell to Democracy
