Senator Pat Moynihan, without doubt one of the most intelligent of all senators, said that the belief of the left is that policy makes culture and that of the right is that culture makes policy. Alan Greenspan, who sat at the feet of Ayn Rand, said after the Russian economic collapse in the late nineties that he was wrong to think that a taste of capitalism would make them law-abiding and democratic. Their culture won.

Peter the Great, the butcher, abdicated and left his palace, saying that he'd be back, invited by the people. He was a blood-stained psychopathic wretch and yet he was right. He was invited back.

Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London, toured China while a Member of Parliament. He dined with the newly wealthy Chinese and asked them if wealth would translate into political liberty, as western theorizers such as Hayek suggested. They were aghast at it because of the instability that it implied. Again, culture wins.

Rossiya, a large Russian television station, is running a poll for the greatest Russian ever. Stalin, the second biggest butcher in history, exceeded only by Mao, could hit number one. Lenin is also in the running. More here.

V. S. Naipaul, a very talented writer, wrote Among the Infidels, his tour of five Islamic countries twenty years ago. Over and over he talks about the Muslims' technological failures, and says that they may come to the West and pick up a skill, such as medicine or engineering, and yet not understand the liberties and freedoms of the west, the political currency that we have built up over millennia.

An old saying is that it takes a thousand years to get the peasant out of a man. I thought that was referring to my uncouth habits but more and more I think that it is a statement of how deeply our roots are drilled into us--throwing them away would be an act of such deracination that members of a proud people, such as the Muslims, would have to reject all that they'd been taught. Einstein said that common sense is the prejudices you've had drilled into you before the age of 18. This is only true if the common sense is common according to locality.

All of this indicates to me that our best hope for survival is not to win the hearts and minds of other people by a handshake and a group hug, but to have enough weapons to see them off if necessary.