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What the "Rule of Law" is Really About
Andrew C. McCarthy, National ReviewCivilized is a much-misunderstood word, thanks to the rule of law crowd that is making our planet an increasingly dangerous place. Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesnt recede willingly before the wheels of progress. There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with dignity and respect, to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it to purge the very mention of its name in the vain hope that it will just go away. Evil doesnt do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or youre part of the problem. The men who founded our country and crafted our Constitution understood this. They understood that the rule of law was not a faux-civilized counterweight to the exhibition of might. Might, instead, is the firm underpinning of law and of our civilization. The Constitution explicitly recognized that the United States would have enemies; it provided Congress with the power to raise military forces that would fight them; it made the chief executive the commander-in-chief, concentrating in the presidency all the power the nation could muster to preserve itself by repelling evil. It did not regard evil as having a point of view, much less a right to counsel. Thats not our position anymore. The scourge of piracy was virtually wiped out in 19th century because its practitioners were regarded as barbarians enemies of the human race (hostis humani generis, as Bret Stephens recently reminded us in a brilliant Wall Street Journal essay). They derived no comfort from the rule of law, for it was not a mark of civilization to give them comfort. The same is true of unlawful enemy combatants, terrorists who scoffed at the customs of civilized warfare. To regard them as mere criminals, to assume the duty of trying to understand why they would brutalize innocents, to arm them with rights against civilized society, was not civilized. Posted by: Mike 2009-04-10 |
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