White Man's Burden

Two items in the news struck me today and for whatever reason I ended up pulling them together. 

First, this from a brief obituary by NRO's Victor Davis Hanson on the occasion of the passing of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke:

He clearly represented a wing of the Democratic party that used to be its mainstream: his unabashed and idealistic confidence in the utility of American power, and his faith that his sometimes flawed nation was far better than the alternative and did not have to be perfect to be quite good.

Next, this headline and the attending story from the Sudan: "Police arrest women protesting at flogging video"

Together, they made me pine for a time when the West was more self-confident and less captive to the idiocies of multiculturalism and political correctness.  In another time, prompted by this story from the Sudan, and given the general state of women in most Islamic countries, some hard-boiled diplomat and/or geopolitically sensitive prime minister or president might have been moved to lobby their legislatures actually to hire Christian missionaries to send to the Sudan and spread the gospel.  They would have done so without a hint of sentimentalism, or even imperialism in the more strict, and honest, sense of that word.  They would simply have been convinced that establishing a beachhead of Christianity in that sad region of the world would have been good for them and good for us.

(Standing by for the charges of bigotry that are sure to follow.)