Some Right-side Bearings

I don't say that this is something guaranteed to make everybody happy. 

But what I think I've learned, these past 15 or so years, is that there is no human satisfaction quite like moral superiority. Especially when you know -  I mean, you know that you know that you know - you're doing your very best to be right. Whereas, if only you could be half-as-sure about the guy next to you . . .

Except that having and holding the moral high ground these days can be quite a challenging feat. If not positively acrobatic. And all the more so, of course, when it is the politically* moral high ground you're after.

*And, seriously, is there anything authentically moral that isn't also political?

In brief, how can you be sure that the political position you held last week, and in complete good faith, will have the same morally unassailable credentials a week from now? Or next month, or next year? Indeed, if I may venture to say: If there's one safe bet anyone can make, it is that our moral progress is only sure to get more complicated with time. And Progress. 

At the same time, either there have been - across the political and geopolitical West - certain recognizable patterns and consistencies these past 20-odd years, or else I've grown completely psychotic (no comments please). And so, for all you tender souls who'd like nothing better than a map for staying on the Right Side of History, of course I don't have one. But here, I think, are some pretty solid ground rules all but guaranteed to please eve the purest, most globally-enlightened bien-pensants. But especially those of this Most Enlightened Point in All of Human Time:

1) Russia, in all she does, is never provoked by anyone (and when she is, you'd better believe she roundly deserves it); (bottom of par. 2)

2) Islam - and in particular those revanchist supremacist anti-Western modes of Sunni Islam that have grown exponentially under the favor of the US global security establishment - is never unprovoked in anything it does; plus the provocations it suffers are always unmerited (meaning even its seemingly most disproportionate  acts of retaliation are always understandable, if not completely defensible);

3) Israel, by her mere existence, is a standing and heinous act of provocation to all properly sensitive, right-thinking, rightly-discerning people (and not just to all righteous Muslims); 

4) China (aka Beijing) is the world's ultimate wise and benign provocateur, apart from whose unceasing innovations, provocations, challenges, dynamism, bio-warfare researches, etc, mankind would still be living in the 21st-century equivalent of mud huts and caves.