Creeping Dhimmitude Watch

Via Opinion Journal comes the following disturbing quote from the leader of our closest ally in the war against the Islamofascists:

Just hours before the police arrested 24 British-born Muslims suspected of plotting to blow up as many as 10 airliners over the Atlantic, the British home secretary, John Reid, gave a comprehensive description of how Tony Blair's government saw the war on terror. Reid, who probably knew the raids were coming, called international terrorism the gravest threat to Britain since World War II and attacked civil libertarians as people who "just don't get it." He highlighted a speech that Blair had made little more than a week earlier. Global terrorism, Blair said then, "means traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong as just made for another age."

If you wanted to figure out how the airline plot will change the West, Blair's words would be a good place to start. . . . Blair was not trying to buck us up and steel our resolve by saying that we're at war and that we'll have to pitch in and sacrifice our liberties for a while. He was saying that war has shown many of our liberties to be illusory. The "civil liberties" we know do not bubble up from natural law or from something timeless and universal in the human character. They may be significant accomplishments, but they are temporal ones, bound to certain stages of technology or to certain styles of social organization. Maybe there was something like an Age of Civil Liberties, Blair was telling us, but it is over. [bold added]

If this interpretation of Blair's speech is correct, then Britain is in serious trouble. And America is not far behind. Recently, both noumenalself and I have discussed the dangers inherent in expanding the power of the government in the name of fighting this undeclared war. And that last adjective is crucial: A war declaration, as that last link points out, would provide a way to limit the power of the President to encroach upon civil liberties. (Our Founding Fathers even thought of that!) I don't know whether Great Britain has anything like America's constitutional safeguards for individual rights through war time, but I have a feeling that it does not. If so, we have even less excuse for our leaders claiming (or acting like) terrorism has "changed everything".

Whoa, Gus! I can almost hear you saying. That was Tony Blair, not George Bush, who said that. Sure, but if actions speak louder than words, then his lack of a war declaration is deafeningly silent. And then there is the matter of our intellectuals.

Here's what one intellectual, James Taranto, said about Blair in Opinion Journal.

In an age of terror, society ought to be able to strike a reasonable balance between civil liberties and national security. By insisting that liberty is an all-or-nothing proposition, civil libertarians make it more likely that we will eventually end up with nothing.

No. Not a "balance". That's like slowly dribbling everything away at the slots rather than losing it all at once in poker. The end result is the same. We ensure our security and our rights by fighting a declared, ruthless war, with such matters as domestic spying limited to the duration of that war. The key is to recognize that any lower level of protection of our rights is temporary at best and done solely to protect our most basic right, to our lives.

This once again reminds me of the out-of-control government in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where bad economic conditions were used to justify ever more outrageous "emergency" measures. We are already seeing a sort of "trickle-down" of sloppiness in government to the state level. As I said before:

[T]he actions of [Louisiana] Governor Kathleen Blanco and [Jackson, Mississippi] Mayor Frank Melton, both Democrats, are not unique examples of poor government -- of declaring an "emergency" as a means of wielding greater authority when better solutions already exist. Nor is the problem confined to the South or the Democratic Party. Our President and Congress set the stage for just this in 2001 when they began the undeclared "War on Terror" rather than conducting anti-terrorism operations as part of a larger, declared war against the states that sponsor terrorism. Among the many problems this approach has caused has been the various emergency surveillance measures which, though legitimate for a war, do not currently have appropriate limits set by war. [link dropped]

Who would have imagined that a bunch of cave-men would bring us to this back in the days of the Cold War, when Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged?

But there's the rub. Economics no more caused the crises in the novel any more than the cavemen's "airline plot ... change[d] the West". Bad economic ideas led men to accept a vicious cycle of bad economic policy in the novel, just as the notion that appeasement is a viable way to deal with savages has led us to our current problems with terrorism. It is how men react to the problems they face -- be they politicians deciding whether to uphold the Constitution, intellectuals taking sides on an issue, or ordinary men deciding whom to support at the polls -- which will determine whether a challenge is met or metastasizes into a crisis. And those reactions are influenced greatly by the knowledge and beliefs of men.

-- CAV