Inner and outer circles

While still engaged in a supposed war for democracy in Iraq, we now hear the beating of drums in certain quarters that war may be necessary to protect democracy in the Georgian Republic.

All of this love of foreign charades of democracy, while we neglect the charade of the same at home, reminds me of a certain fictional demon's advice to his apprentice:

"Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice then becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary...
Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy; but you must keep shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will."

We are increasingly willing to draw swords to defend some notional new democracy halfway around the world... but most of us can't be bothered to vote at home. We spend untold vast sums of blood and treasure to give others the right to self-determination... but we don't demand our own government give us a say in existential issues for our own nation. We decry human rights abuses by China, North Korea and various Muslim regimes... but reserve for ourselves the right to unconstitutional searches and seizures, and waterboarding of those we think might have useful information.

So while we sally forth like Don Quixote around the world, chasing ephemeral global democracy, we're losing it at home. Screwtape and his master win another one.