The foundational legitimizing myth of today’s liberal regime is that it is justified simply—and, in fact, solely—by its moral superiority to the former Communist one. Even if nothing goes right in any area of life, at least we have one thing in our favor: we are not Communists.
Yet as repression grows against opponents—or supposed opponents—of the liberal oligarchy (we should not forget that conditions like those under prime minister Fiala could easily return), the points on which liberal regimes can claim superiority are gradually disappearing. One remains, and it is the strongest: shooting people at the border. It is abhorrent and indefensible when armed forces refuse to let people leave a country and, if they refuse to take no for an answer, kill them. Perhaps one could understand it in the case of people who know some important secret—but every person in the country? Madness.
By contrast, we consider it legitimate for many states to guard their borders firmly against people trying to enter. Even liberals accept this, as long as it is not their own countries.
Liberal regimes are therefore morally superior to Communist ones because they do not hold anyone by force. Yet even this last advantage is beginning to crumble. We readily support a Ukraine ringed with barbed wire, where conditions along the border are like those here in the 1950s. And the European Union pays ten countries in North Africa and the Middle East to guard their borders from within, often by very harsh means, including barbed wire. This is no longer something considered absolutely unacceptable on moral grounds. It is the price of liberal states’ inability to protect their own borders from aggressors.
The last moral advantage is fading away.
Let me be clear: I do not condemn this. I am glad the EU is trying to stop these people. We simply need it. But then it is hard to condemn, on principle, other regimes that did something similar in the past.