UK - BBC: "delusional soul"

sums up the BBC so well.

Do read the whole article but this sums up the BBC so well.

"Here is the utopian temperament, the ghost of Munich 1938, the delusional soul that reduces evil to economics and idolizes peace at the expense of human freedom. While Mr. Sachs was waxing eloquent about our shared values, terrorists in Iraq drove a car to a security check point and were waved through because there were two small children in the back seat. They fled the vehicle and blew it up—with the children inside. While Mr. Sachs was dining with fellow appeasers on the BBC expense account, Britain sentenced five men to life in prison for a bomb plot linked to al Qaeda that could have killed thousands of civilians; in addition to chemical weapons, they had hoped to acquire nuclear material to create a dirty bomb.

Not to worry: Such unpleasantness can swiftly be overcome with the right mix of technology, politics and patience. “The issue here is not religious strife that is out of control and boiling over,” says Mr. Sachs. “It’s controllable. It’s a matter of politics, it’s a matter of management, it’s a matter of understanding, it’s a matter of institutions, it’s a matter of how we behave. We have to see how there’s another way. So these are processes, peace is a process.”

Lewis Mumford, who joined Reinhold Niebuhr’s group of “Christian realists” in the 1930s, saw a different and more sinister process at work. “Unless we head off these false hopes, lazy wishful attitudes, and perfectionist illusions, we will continue to defeat all our legitimate expectations and deplete the moral energies we will badly need to achieve the relative goods that will be open to us,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the spirit of utopianism has not yet been exorcized.”

As Mr. Sachs completes his lecture series this week, now would be a good time to call in an exorcist or two."