Other topics:

In any case, one of the things that liberals love to rail about in American culture is the use of corporal punishment with children. They have spent much of the last half century trying to convince everyone that corporal punishment is an fundamentalist, barbaric, and anally fixated (pun intended) practice that should be outlawed. They would also like to convince us that their solution of using drugs and psychological manipulation to start with and lifetime imprisonment for those who fail to respond is an improvement.

My last trip to Russia, however, put this theory in serious jeopardy. My translator--a very secular person--consented to go with me to a Pentecostal church which was affiliated with the one I attended back home. It took some doing convincing our church contacts in Moscow that we wanted to go to a Russian church (as opposed to an expatriate one) but we finally did. I even knew the pastor.

We ended up with me, my translator, his wife and 2 1/2 year old son, and another Russian colleague of ours going to a church that met at the "Hammer and Sickle Culture Palace." The service went as planned, but the 2 1/2 year old acted...well, as one would expect a 2 1/2 year old who had never been to church before. This required measures; his father and mother took turns taking him out of the worship service so as not to be disruptive. At one point when his mother had guard duty, his father turned to me, pointed to his belt, and said, "He only understands this."

This disproved a lot of theories. Corporal punishment is not the exclusive province of fundamentalists, nor is it the principal result of rude American culture. Russian culture antedates ours by six hundred years, and in some ways Moscow is in fact the "Fourth Rome." People have been applying the board of education to the seat of knowledge since civilisation began; there is no reason that liberals have any better grasp on this problem than they do on anything else. Corporal punishment is an effective way of demonstrating parental authority; one of liberalism's long term objectives is to weaken or destroy this authority, and in its vacuum establish the supremacy of the state. This is the real reason why corporal punishment is a bête noire of liberalism.

Such thinking, however, can be applied to foreign policy also. The war against Islamic careerism is peppered with incidents where the "terrorists" commit barbaric acts, such as blowing up an entire barracks (Lebanon,) pushing an elderly Jewish man in a wheelchair into the Mediterranean, or beheading a prisoner on the Internet (Iraq.) Liberals inevitably attempt to a) minimise such incidents in the press that happens to be under their control and b) attempt to appeal to the rest of us to understand how these people work and not to respond using force. The obvious problem here is that the Islamic careerists in question are very much like our 2 1/2 year old: they only understand the use of force, and interpret anything less as a sign of weakness. The Russians understand this; Vladimir Putin reminded us that his task was not to negotiate with terrorists but to kill them.

It is our view, though, that liberals are not only wrong on both corporal punishment and foreign policy but hypocritical as well. The key is that we are dealing with careerists; Islam does not have a monopoly on careerism. Indeed, by expanding state power, liberalism will force more and more people into vicious careerism just to survive. Liberals themselves are careerists par excellence, as they measure their success by the power they wield and mourn as for an only son when they don't have it. There's no reason to think that liberals, faced with challenges to their own power, will show their opponents any mercy. Liberals prefer to use as their weapon an expensive, ponderous judicial system, but if the judges are in their pockets, is the result any better than the use of force? It is simply torture sanctified under law.

We live in a dangerous world where careerists strive for control of our lives. This is why we need a Saviour in this life more than anything else; in such a world, He is our only hope. In the meanwhile we must deal with these careerists--Islamic, liberal, and otherwise--because ultimately they only understand "this."