Obama, Relativism, and the Concentration Camp

One danger particular to democratic states is that elected politicians who wish to remain in office have an incentive to bring long-term damage to their country for immediate electoral gain. There is some evidence that the Obama administration has chosen to court China over our traditional allies in order to stabilize our country until the 2012 election. {Italian} If this is true, the domestic costs will be great because the middle class will further erode and family life will suffer as more and more jobs relocate to Asia. Perhaps this is the real reason for the dramatic push to nationalize our health care. Once our manufacturing sector relocates completely in Asia it will be impossible for most families to pay their premiums. In any case, any opening to China is dangerous to the future of the United States.

Many people laughed when President Bush labeled Iraq, North Korea, and Iran the ‘axis of evil’. Although this statement may have been a foreign policy disaster, the problem is that this criticism fails to realize that there is a real evil we must confront as individuals and as a civilization. When we fail to see this reality, we open ourselves to a grave threat. Yet, there is a real danger that in a post-holocaust civilization we will fail to recognize the existence of evil. Culturally, we are embracing relativistic positions that deny the reality and danger of evil. We are naïve to hold to this idea when we have seen the concentration camp and the dangers this institution poses even today. An honest assessment of recent history compels us to change our position and to hold a more realistic understanding of the potential dangers to our humanity and our society. By denying evil we open ourselves to its emergence.

We are endangering our future by following policies that bring us closer to the country that has murdered more of its citizens than any other state in world history. China has killed more people than the Nazis or Soviets combined, and we are becoming subservient to a regime with blood on its hands. In Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Harvard, he warned the U.S. of the deadly consequences of this relationship:

At present, some Western voices already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one; in this case the shield would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the one perpetrated in Cambodia in our days.

I hope that Solzhenitsyn was wrong about where we will end up, but we must acknowledge that a friendship with China opens us to grave dangers and as they gain additional economic, and eventually military, leverage over the United States, it will be more difficult for us to resist their advances.