The Economic Nationalist

Peter Hichens writes,

And then there is the general problem with despots, created by our pious insistence on frogmarching them, in chains, in front of righteous tribunals. What tyrant, seeing the imprisonment of Milosevic, the hanging of Saddam, and the harassment of Pinochet and Honecker, would be stupid enough to abandon his sovereign immunity and volunteer for the cells?… [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong Il, now 65 and in poor health, has no incentive to dismantle his kingdom of lies and repression….

Precisely.

This incidentally is what some Americans still do not understand, who think that we should have jailed Richard Nixon, no despot he. It was not a guilty Nixon we would have been punishing. It was us.

If you wish to learn wisdom in what makes one country’s constitution fail and another’s prosper then you could do much worse than to meditate an hour on Mr. Hitchens’ perspicacity. But, then, you might also begin to understand why your state’s “child protection” bureaucracy does so much more harm than good, why we should not invite female police to patrol our streets and highways, and so on. Like everything else wrong with liberalism, it has to do with unintended effects.

Augusto Pinochet, incidentally, was hardly more a despot than was Abraham Lincoln. Both were hard men in hard times, rightly regarded as heroes by some.

The deep, conservative principle underlying Mr. Hitchens’ observation illuminates a rich domain of hidden truth.

HJH

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Political theory, Foreign policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.