Liberty For All vs. Prevalent World Opinion

I often refer to my country of Canada as "Kanuckistan". Why? Because the prevalent opinion of my fellow citizens seems to be exemplified around these tenets:

• America is evil and the cause of more problems in the world than anyone else.
• It's much better to be like Canadians and stick our heads in the sand, pretending that there's no evil in the world.
• If Canadians don't offend anyone then nothing bad will ever happen to us.
• Why are some people upset with Hezbollah sympathizers marching in the streets of Montreal? After all, they were only labelled a terrorist organization because powerful Jewish groups pressured the government into doing so. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
  
• Fidel Castro is not a bad man, just a misunderstood one.
• China is a benign country that will never cause any harm to anyone. Well, there was the issue of Tibet but I've long displayed a "Free Tibet" sticker on my car so I'm doing my part to help them.
• Israel is the root cause of all the problems in the Middle East. Those poor Palestinians. Isn't that horrible the way Israel has oppressed them. You know, Israel is an invention of the West and shouldn't really exist anyway.
• What's so wrong with Iran developing nuclear weapons? Israel and the U.S. have plenty of them. Iran getting them would be no different. They just need them to protect themselves from those crazy neocons.
• The violent actions of those Muslim militants aren't nice but such suicide actions are simply the only weapons they have to fight back against the horrible oppression brought upon them by Western nations. It's really our fault. Well actually, it's really George Bush's fault.

And on and on and on it goes. I hear such comments on the radio, at dinner parties, on the street, and in coffee shops. Sometimes I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone. It's as if I missed some critical civics lesson on the importance of moral equivalency and Western guilt. When I hear such things, I just scratch my head and wonder what is driving such thought:

• Naivety?
• Lack of history lessons?
• Guilt, pure & simple?
  

Such mindsets are going to get us all killed. These same views were clearly present in the West in the 1930's and 40's too. History shows us that Hitler had an insatiable desire to rule the world, yet such voices of appeasement existed back then too. They definitely were in Britain until September 3, 1939. They definitely were in the U.S. until December 7, 1941.

One of my favourite writers, Mark Steyn, is currently down in Australia on a speaking tour. In recent articles and interviews he is railing against the notion that all cultures are equal. The [false] premise goes something like this: "If you're standing in a room with say 2 Frenchmen, 4 Iranians, and 3 Chinese then your opinions about what is right & wrong and what is moral & immoral are completely wrong if the others disagree with you. For if the overall 'vote' sides with oppression and/or hypocrisy then they must be right and you must be wrong."

I vehemently disagree with this notion yet it clearly is the prevalent one in Kanuckistan these days. Maybe people will wake up after a Canadian city or airplane is attacked. Somehow I doubt it though; the apologists will still win the day.