This has been a cause of mine for some time, but I was encouraged by the WSJ Editorial last Tuesday about the UN Council of Democracies -- this is real, not a pundit's dream.

"In June 2000, the U.S., under the leadership of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and in cooperation with Poland, Chile, Mali and other democratic states, convened the first meeting of the CD to "collaborate on democratic-related issues in existing international and regional institutions . . . aimed at the promotion of democratic government." More than 100 countries participated. It was necessary for the CD to withhold full membership from some countries that sought to be included but did not adequately meet democratic standards. A second such meeting took place in Seoul in November 2002, where participants reaffirmed the need to create a U.N. Caucus of Democratic States. Secretary of State Colin Powell called it "a new tool in the U.S. policy tool bag." A third meeting of the CD is scheduled for Chile in 2005. The CD could be effective in refocusing the efforts of the U.N. to more closely follow its founding principles. At the same time, the CD is uniquely capable of filling the gaps left by the U.N.'s inadequacies, both internally and externally. But the CD's existence seems to be a great secret in the press. How often have you read about it?"

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004512

By truly great article I hope you mean the basic premise of a new smaller league of nations open only to free democratic states. The rest I would dismiss as the rantings of a radical college student.

To say that Britian especially gained nothing from the alliance with Stalin is a ridiculous statement with no basis in fact. Britian gained everything, namely their own sovereignty from the alliance. Stalin, without offers of assistance and alliance from Britian could have gone the way of Mussolini and sided with Hitler. Russia, for its part paid dearly for their opposition but the addition of an eastern front and the resources required to maintain it is one of the largest reasons that Britain did not fall to the Nazis. In addition, how exactly would we have "finished Stalin off" in 1945? Muster battle weary Allied forces to turn against them and drive to Moscow, or perhaps use nuclear weapons to force a surrender? Maybe the post cold war public could have been rallied to that, but certainly not the American public of 1945. Monday morning quarterbacking of a game you didn't watch.

On to this new league of nations, are we really to excluded socialist democracies, or only those we don't currently like? Maybe this should be the Friends of the US league and each nation could go through a yearly review to determine if their views align closely enough with ours. The basic concept of a new league of like minded nations with a unified moral purpose is compelling but unlikely to survive the reality of always meeting the seperate interests of the member nations.

Silence, you have missed the point. If the members share a "unified moral purpose," and that morality is based upon reason and not faith, then the reality is that the separate interests of the member nations will be unified as well. And these objectively moral interests are what the author refers to free states and dictatorships being diametrically opposed over.

Britain maintained sovereignty after the war by WINNING. Britain received little or no war materiel from the USSR, that came from America, along with several hundred thousand G.I.s. All the alliance did was establish an uneasy truce between the USSR and allied nations once the war ended. To say that Stalin could have sided with Hitler and, therefore, cost the allies the war is to ignore the historical fact that Stalin DID side with Hitler, only to have the Nazis invade his country anyway. The creator of the devastating eastern front that may well have saved Britain was Hitler, not Stalin.

No, I don't mean simply the idea of the League itself is truly great. I was referring, most importantly, to the final four paragraphs with special emphasis on the last two. I suggest you read them again.

John, I do actually get the writer's point, but believe that a group of nations with a unified moral purpose is a tantilizing but unrealistic idea. If France is too far socialist to fit into this new league, that what exactly would the charter look like? We and our allies all embrace different degrees of socialism based on moral values and a belief that a civilized society has the duty to rise above the law of nature. Pure capitalism at its base is the law of nature in economics, the strong survive and flourish and the weak perish. Socialism is basically a method of tempering this fact with regulations and programs to aid the weak. How far you take it depends on your sense of fairness. So already you have moral differences even between the staunchest of allies. For a government to put the life of its citizens and its economic prosperity on the line requires an extremely strong sense of purpose, something rarely achievable from moral values alone. Terrorism existed long before 9/11, but we did not feel the imperitive to address it until we personally were directly and decisively affected. You can form your new morally united alliance, but don't be suprised if it soon disolves into something not much more effective than the current UN.

Silence, I would like to restate one of your key points in more precise objective terms:

- Most citizens of America and her allies embrace different degrees of socialism based on THEISTIC moral values, e.g. ALTRUISM, and the COLLECTIVIST belief that INDIVIDUALS have a "duty" to subordinate themselves to the law of a so-called "civilized society" and thereby "rise above" the law of reality, derisively referred to as the "law of the jungle."

Marriott points out, correctly, that "if you base your morality on [a] ficticious being in the sky then it is as worthless as the dirt you think you were created from." That's what is wrong with the preceeding statement. Whether consciously or not it is based on subservience to the purported demands of a ficticious being in the sky, or to those of the corresponding ficticious being on earth known as "civilized society."

Marriott then proceeds to offer something that is almost unheard of in modern social commentary: an alternative. "Reason is the only thing that can lead one to morality, or a morality that is moral anyway." This is because, as I cited in my original post, "the moral is the chosen, not the obeyed."

You have dismissed these ideas as "unrealistic." JK offhandedly called them "a pundit's dream." Marriott himself lamented that "this is all, of course, merely a fantasy." I say instead that they are an ideal. They are the ideal of individual liberty, which the founders of the United States sought to embrace and this Liberty League fantasy would actively defend. To dismiss this ideal as unachievable in whole so therefore unachievable in part is to pretend that human civilization can never progress beyond its current state, which although at its zenith historically still has far to go. If, on the other hand, your ideal is world socialism, then you should just say as much.

On a related note... today's Cox and Forkum cartoon, inspired by a recent event, highlights realization of the ideal of altruism. (Be sure to read the commentary.)

http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000258.html

How can anyone continue to deny that altruism, whether theistic or socialistic, is evil?