I was thinking about this in regards to David Cameron, the British PM, who said to a group of Pakistani students on the subject of Kashmir:
“I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”
His remarks about Kashmir were greeted warmly by the audience of Pakistani students and academics, but drew accusations from historians that the Prime Minister was wrongly apologising for Britain’s past....
While this isn't a formal apology per se, it is typical of liberal self-flagellation. Barack Obama has apologized for America's industrial strength, for winning two World Wars, for George W. Bush, and...well, let's say in Obama's eyes, the entirety of the American experiment has been a failure. Until the people elected him to set it straight.
The mindset behind this is that aggrieved folks will accept our apology, and be more positively predisposed to us afterwards. But what if the people we apologize to are improperly aggrieved at us, and are not liberals at all, but, say...bloodthirsty barbarians instead?
Ted Bromund at Contentions:
It is an expression of the liberal fallacy that weakness, humility, self-laceration, and regret are a kind of strength, which is true only if the other side is composed of liberals.
Regrettably, liberals of any sort are thin on the ground in Pakistan...
Living in the cocoon, liberals simply cannot believe all "intelligent people" don't think exactly the way they do. Hence their angry dismissal of their fellow Americans who may choose to vote Republican as no more than ignorant, red-necked racists. They'll never expressed such emotions towards a foreigner, so the instinct is to apologize - apologize for what Republicans have done, and assure our enemies that a liberal America is their friend, and will never scold it, and knows, after all, that Islamists and Palestinians really want the same things that we do - peace, prosperity, legal abortions, and gay pride parades.
But as Bromund points out above, there really is no thing as a liberal Islamist, or a progressive Palestinian. They are killers. And they see our apologies as what they are: an admission of guilt, and a silent assertion that, having f*cked up so much already, we would never dare interfere with the execution of their current plans, even if it involves...the execution of gays, Jews, and abortionists.
Our enemies take our apologies at face value, and move forward based on them and the meaning behind them. Liberals, who see them as the opening salvo in a tit-for-tat (our apology to be followed by their apology, to be followed by groups hugs, and fully signed peace treaties - all within 15 minutes) expect their self-humiliation to be reciprocated. Note the dumbfounded expression when the code fails to take hold - the befuddled Barack Obama, for instance, who keeps reaching out to Iran over and over again despite having his hand spit on time after time, because he simply cannot comprehend the rejection of the liberal apology, and knows no other way forward.
And when the Iranians and the Palestinians and the Syrians wage their war against the West - and boy, is that coming down the pipe - expect confused, cocooned liberals to explode in exasperation, claiming it wasn't their fault, they tried, they apologized, they meant well...
None of which will raise the dead, sent to an early grave by the groveling ignorance that passes for wisdom inside the liberal cocoon...