Happy "Unilateralist" Day!
Hat tip to quidnunc at Free Republic for posting this prescient, albeit 3 year old piece by Mark Steyn. Other than the Declaration of Independence, this Steyn piece is today's must read, especially in light of the failed Euro Constitution and the ever arrogant Euro elites who depend on us for their defense while they denigrate our "unilateralism" aka, independence. Here are a couple of tidbits from Steyn:
July 4th 2002Be sure to read the entire piece...it's a gem! And thank God if you happen to be an American.
To celebrate America’s Independence Day, I celebrated America’s independence – not just from George III but from the rest of what passes for the civilised world. You only have to listen to a couple of minutes of any BBC current affairs show or glance at the front pages of any Continental newspaper (or even, on particularly bad days, read selected Telegraph columnists) to realise that America is the western world’s odd man out, and has been increasingly since September 11th.
Personally, I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m delighted the United States is “out of step” with, say, Belgium. Not because I’m Belgophobic. If the Belgians want to support the International Criminal Court, keep Saddam in office until his nuke arsenal is ready to fly, and continue subsidising Yasser Arafat’s pay-offs to the relicts of suicide bombers, that’s fine, go ahead, you’re an independent nation.
Unfortunately, on the European side, it’s the very concept of independence that’s at issue. The Rest Of The West disputes not America’s positions so much as their right to have positions. To do so is “unilateralist” – which is, when you think about it, just another word for “independent”. When your positions are as independent of the global consensus as those of Mr Bush then you must be – all together now – “arrogant”. Or so we are assured by such famously modest types as John Simpson, the liberator of Kabul, and his anonymous interviewee in these pages last week, the “leading British civil servant” who complained about the President’s “arrogance” while describing him as “a bear of very little brain”.
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