{"id":3578,"date":"2007-05-19T14:58:04","date_gmt":"2007-05-19T21:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/19\/divine-providence-and-our-present-lot\/"},"modified":"2007-05-20T11:26:48","modified_gmt":"2007-05-20T18:26:48","slug":"divine-providence-and-our-present-lot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/19\/divine-providence-and-our-present-lot\/","title":{"rendered":"Divine Providence and Our Present Lot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the latest issue of <em>The American Conservative<\/em>, a review by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Peter_Hitchens\">Peter Hitchens<\/a> (the <a href=\"http:\/\/hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk\/2006\/05\/is_there_any_go.html\">Good<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/books.guardian.co.uk\/hay2005\/story\/0,,1496348,00.html\">Hitchens<\/a>) of John O&#8217;Sullivan&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/President-Pope-Prime-Minister-Changed\/dp\/1596980168\">The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The death of communism was brought about by what seems to O&#8217;Sullivan to have been the very hand of Providence, a benevolent God who deemed that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/rothbard\/rothbard49.html\">Reagan<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mises.org\/econsense\/ch62.asp\">Thatcher<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/justin\/?articleid=5441\">Wojtyla<\/a> should all have attained their offices simultaneously. O&#8217;Sullivan&#8217;s thesis is that these three coalesced in a divine concatenation of forces, as it were, that brought down the godless Soviets. As &#8220;one of the last Protestants still standing in Britain,&#8221; Hitchens is inclined to believe in this miraculous manifestation of divine will, and yet:<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;I cannot quite share John O&#8217;Sullivan&#8217;s awe at these things, even though I once did, and even though I should like to. As I read, and enjoyed, his fond recollections of Margaret Thatcher&#8217;s resolve and Ronald Reagan&#8217;s humorous squashing of liberal idiocy, I kept thinking, &#8216;Yes, so it was, but why in that case have we ended up as we are?'&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As more conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic begin to ask that question, the base of the War Party will start to crack.<\/p>\n<p>I see this isn&#8217;t online, which is often the case with <em>TAC<\/em>&#8216;s best stuff: which means that <a href=\"http:\/\/ezsub.net\/isapi\/foxisapi.dll\/main.sv.run?jt=starr_wc&#038;PUBID=503&#038;SOURCE=INET&#038;RDRID=&#038;SBTYPE=QN&#038;PGTP=S\">you&#8217;ve really got to subscribe<\/a> to what is, to my mind, the most interesting magazine of political opinion in America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the latest issue of The American Conservative, a review by Peter Hitchens (the Good Hitchens) of John O&#8217;Sullivan&#8217;s The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World: &#8220;I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3578"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}