Bonne annee. Welcome to the New Year.
Take a deep breath, savour the moment and be an adult in a world awash in a rising tide of bigotry and the noise of political drivel pouring forth from our media as news.
Being adult means being a realist.
It means looking at the world as it is and recognizing that the fundamental attributes of human nature reflected in politics remain mostly unchanged from the age, for instance, of Thucydides some 25 centuries ago when he chronicled the Peloponnesian War that consumed the city-states of Hellas or ancient Greece.
The envy of failure against success, the loathing of others, the praise for one’s god over those of foreigners, the bigotry born out of self righteousness, and the evil that readily preys upon the good in our world would be instantly recognizable to Thucydides if he appeared among us.
He wrote, “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”
The power of Athens was, in the words of Pericles as reported by Thucydides, inspiring and memorable.
Pericles told the Athenians, “Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people … We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law.”
Athens’ success was envied across Hellas.
And Pericles reminded Athenian citizens, “Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft … When we do kindness to others, we do not do them out of any calculations of profit or loss: we do them without afterthought, relying on our free liberality. Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece.”
Thucydides likely embellished Pericles oration, yet what was essential in distinguishing Athens from Sparta and its allies rings true across the centuries.
But for Sparta, Athenian democracy was an existential threat and sufficiently loathed to spark a war.
There have been other states since the Athens of Pericles – Britain, for instance, in the age of Gladstone in the 19th century – driven by those ideals, but none more so than the United States from the moment of its revolutionary beginnings.
Democracy and freedom together as irresistible power generate envy and loathing among people intolerant of both.
And evil in various totalitarian guises – German Nazism, Italian Fascism, Japanese militarism, Soviet Communism and in our time, radical Islamism – repeatedly appears, as in Thucydides’ age, to test the mettle of free people.
Freedom, however, as Pericles understood, can be a heavy burden for many even when they profit from living in free society.
Freedom and democracy on many occasions have stood perilously alone as flickering lights on a continent made dark by tyranny, as was once lonely Britain across from the Nazi-dominated Europe, or as is present-day Israel surrounded by Arab dictatorships and the barbarian frenzy of radical Islamists.
When freedom fails, as once the France of Voltaire and Emile Zola succumbed to the Nazi hordes, the lesson is obvious: The internal foes of freedom have succeeded in their subversion.
It is, hence, worth being mindful as another year begins, how foolish it can be taking for granted democracy and freedom when enemies stalk them with their deadly fangs exposed.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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- The better man lost the U.S. election - Saturday November 10, 2012 at 9:16 am
- The puzzle in U.S. presidential elections - Saturday November 3, 2012 at 8:43 am
