We will not shrug

America’s gift to the world

By Shalev Ben-Avraham
From the December 2005 Print Edition

Take up the American burden —

No tawdry rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper —

The tale of common things.

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go mark them with your living,

And mark them with your dead.

We are at war. And it is a war that has been raging for almost 2,500 years. The current battle, the war on terror, is only one skirmish we have been fighting for time immemorial, and it is now our generation’s time to pick up the standard. It is our time to spread forth our beliefs in natural rights, individual liberties, and democratic freedom, and to bring about the eventual end of our struggle. “What war,” you ask? This is the war against Western civilization; it is a war that has pitted our political and intellectual ancestors against an aggressive foe that will not stop until they have killed our very way of life.

To know our enemy, we must first know ourselves, and the depths of our history. The first action of this war took place during what is known as the Greco-Persian wars, in 500 BCE. Darius the Great was the ruler of Persia and had conquered many lands including Ionia. The Ionians were Greek culturally and saw Darius as a tyrant. They revolted against his rule, and successfully appealed to their brothers in Greece Proper for help. Darius responded by putting down the revolt, and then lunching an invasion. The Greeks defeated the numerically superior Persians, who were attempting to turn all Greeks into slaves for their empire.

This was the first battle that set the democracy and freedom of Greece against the tyranny of Persia. If the Greeks had not won that first battle, the history of Western civilization would have been completely different. Their use of democracy and their belief in individualism are what connects us to them. They were our political grandfathers, and their course would meet with significant opposition for many years.

Fast forward more than 1,000 years. Islam is on the rise, spreading itself by the sword of the stampeding horde. The Moors of North Africa have conquered the Iberian Peninsula and attempted to spread into the rest of Western Europe. In 732, Charles Martel led the Frankish forces at the battle of Tours, where they stopped the spread of Islam. This battle was one of the most important in the war, for it allowed Western Europe to continue to develop under its own rule, rather than that of the Moors. Over the next 800 years, countless battles crashed on the borders between Islam and Christian Europe. These battles against Islam were not merely for control and power; they were to secure and protect the development of Western civilization, for if the Ottomans or the Moors had won, Europe would have been Islamic, the same as the Arabian Peninsula.

These battles allowed for the continued development of Europe as we know it, the Europe that had grown from Plato and Aristotle, a Europe that would eventually become the breeding ground of individual liberties and freedoms. This is not to say all of Western civilization embraced these beliefs, or does today; however, Western civilization could not have developed those ideas if the continent had been under Islamic rule. Europe and the Western world needed to evolve, governed by none but itself to truly grow its identity.

On 9/11, the war was brought to our doorstep. The terrorist attack was an attack on our way of life. So it is now our turn to bear the burden of protecting Western civilization. We can either fight this battle and see the war continue, or we can use this battle to end the war for good. This second option can only be accomplished if we spread constitutional democracy and natural rights to the world. We must light up the darkened corners of the globe that live in oppression. Think of this as our newest Marshall Plan: it is our gift to the world, and it is only when all humans on earth are able to exercise their inalienable rights that we can end our mission. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As long as people are being oppressed, our way of life is threatened, and this is why we must spread freedom around the world. We must bring to the globe our belief in liberty and democracy.

For too long, we have fought this war on the defensive, retreating to our buttressed walls, protecting ourselves from the world around us. Greece just wanted to survive. Europe spent thousands of years in territorial battles, defending itself against onslaughts from the south, from the east, from within. America is no different, staying out of the fray, just trying to live out lives. This can no longer be our position. We must go on the offensive. The very word ‘offensive’ might imply hatred to some, aggression without cause. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that cowering behind a large wall and hoping for the best is the surest way to let your enemy fester and grow.

Some would say, “Who are you to impose your beliefs upon other cultures, especially when they have been around longer than you have?” The best answer to that was written in 1776 by Thomas Paine, who wrote, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” Iraq represents our first real opportunity to achieve more than just a victory on the battlefield. It offers us a chance to make progress in ending this war. This is now being done through the democracy and freedom we are bringing to Iraq and its people.

Most people opposed to the war in Iraq say we did not go there to bring freedom, but rather to find weapons of mass destruction, or for oil. They say that it is only now that President George W. Bush is trying to use freedom as a rationale. Granted, Bush said we were going into Iraq to find the WMD; however, now our mission has changed, and the public is upset. It important to understand that Bush recognized an opportunity to achieve more than the just the safety of the United States — he saw a chance to bring an oppressed people freedom.

It seems to me that we can draw a parallel between the current Iraq situation, and the one that President Abraham Lincoln faced during the Civil War. As you will recall, Lincoln was only trying to preserve the Union, and had no intentions of freeing the slaves. Most soldiers, in fact, joined to preserve the Union. However, Lincoln changed the war aim, much to the dismay of his troops and the public. No longer was it just a war to preserve the Union. Instead, it became a war to bring freedom to an oppressed people. Lincoln saw a chance to uphold the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and Bush has seen a chance to bring those principles to those who do not have them.

This must become our policy. We must take up this American burden, which has been passed on to us from generations long dead, and we must go forth and bring the four boxes of freedom to the world: the soapbox, the jury box, the ballot box, and the ammo box. Paine wrote, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal … The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling.” Sometimes we will have to bring war to ensure freedom, and we should not shrink from this duty. On the contrary, we should revel in the luck that has been bestowed upon us, that our great nation is being presented with the chance to change the world for good.

Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden was written to encourage Americans that taking control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War was a good thing. The passage at the beginning of this piece is a stanza from that work, with a single word changed. I hope Kipling will encourage our nation in the years ahead, for we have a burden to fulfill. We must bring natural rights to all of mankind, for this is our gift to the world.

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