Opinion/ Mark Steyn: One of the most tediously over-venerated bits of political wisdom comes from Harold MacMillan. It was his characteristically laconic Edwardian response as to what he feared most in the months ahead: "Events, dear boy, events."
It turns up in a gazillion books of quotations and a thousand Fleet Street columns as if it's some brilliant insight.
It's not. It's an urbane banality. Even events come, so to speak, politically predetermined. If, for example, you have powerful public sector unions, you will be at the mercy of potentially crippling strikes. The quasi-Eastern European Britain of the 1970s was brought to a halt by a miners' strike in a way that would have been impossible in the United States. A strike, of course, is man-made. But the best test of the political character of "events" is supposedly natural phenomena. Six years ago this week, an ice storm devastated my corner of the eastern seaboard. On the Vermont/New Hampshire side of the border, people were without power for a couple of days. On the Quebec side of the border, some were without power for the best part of a couple of months. Did God spot the frontier posts on His GPS monitor and decide to afflict people in Quebec more? It doesn't seem likely. It's true the pictures of Montreal on the morning of the ice storm look much worse than those of Burlington, Vermont. But that's because in Montreal the streets were still clogged with uncleared snow from the previous week, thanks to the unionised municipal government's desultory approach to winter maintenance.
Here's a starker example: the two images that for me sum up the aftermath of September 11th - on the one hand, the New York firemen pounding up the stairs of the World Trade Centre to rescue those in the towers; and, on the other, a fire in Mecca a few months later. Some young Saudi girls were trying to flee a blazing school, but they were prevented from doing so by the mutaween - the religious police - who beat them with sticks and drove them back inside the building to perish in the flames.
Why would they do such a thing? Because the girls, in their haste to escape the inferno, had neglected to put on their head scarves. Fifteen of them died. It really is as basic as that: there are cultures that create civic institutions to rescue you from the fire, and there are cultures which create civic institutions to push you back in and be consumed by the fire.
2003 provided some especially salutary lessons in the political nature of "events". Example 1: In the last days of the year, there were two earthquakes - one in California - one in Iran. The Californian one measured 6.5 on the Richter scale, the Iranian one measured (according to its government) 6.3. The Californian earthquake killed two people and did little physical damage.
The Iranian earthquake killed somewhere upwards of 40,000 people and reduced an entire city to rubble. Everything fell down, not just the ancient stuff from a thousand years ago, but the schools and hospitals from the eighties and nineties. How many dead there are will remain a matter of guesswork, since no-one seems quite sure how many people were living in Bam at the time - somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000, which is quite a margin of error.
The Israelis, who were a mere two-hour flight from the site, offered to send state-of-the-art disaster relief, but Jahanbakhsh Khanjani, speaking for the Iranian government, said the country would not accept aid from the "Zionist regime". If it's a choice between being pulled out from under the collapsed roof by a Jew or dying down there, the government would rather you died. Example 2: A new disease appeared last spring. It's called SARS and it originated in the People's Republic of China. Because totalitarian regimes lie, China denied there was any problem for three months, and then downplayed the extent of it.
Because UN agencies are unduly deferential to dictatorships, the World Health Organisation accepted Beijing's lies. This enabled SARS to wiggle free of China's borders before anyone knew about it, and, thanks to tourists and businessmen, infect and kill people all over the world.
The Communist Party of China botched the crisis, and declined even to acknowledge there was one until they'd exported their problem to dozens of other jurisdictions, at which point they were forced to come clean - or marginally less unclean. SARS damaged the Chinese claim to modernity. For over a decade, their argument has been that we're not like those clapped-out economic basket-case Slav Commies; oh no, we've found a form of Communism that works. Red China's plan was to cherrypick the aspects of a free society it could live with: if turning its mighty workforce to manufacturing every stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh for DisneyWorld was the only way to make Communism work, so be it.
SARS was a reminder that the quintessential characteristic of even benign dictatorship - secrecy - is profoundly inadequate when you're faced with "events".
Example 3: There was a heatwave in Europe this summer. It made life uncomfortable everywhere, from London to Rome. But only in France did the death toll climb up and up. The "brutal Iraqi summer" so eagerly anticipated by the Continent's anti-Americans is believed to have killed two US soldiers. The brutal Gallic summer wound up killing well over 10,000. Why? It seems to have been a combination of factors. Snobbery: the French regard air-conditioners as vulgar and American. Big government: the French healthcare system is designed for the convenience of its employees, so in summer it's on vacation.
Heartlessness: the entire country goes to the beach in August, and having grandmother along would be too much of a drag so it's easier to leave her in her airless city apartment. Bernard Mazeyrie, managing director of France's largest undertakers, noted that many of the bereaved were in no hurry to bury their aged loved ones, and preferred to leave them on ice while they stayed sur la plage to finish their holidays.
By the standards of the world, Iran, China and France are all wealthy societies. They're vulnerable to "events" because of their organisational principles - a primitive theocracy which disdains modernity; a modified totalitarianism which thinks you can reap the benefits of capitalism without the institutions of liberty; and a cradle-to-grave welfare state that has so enfeebled its citizens' ability to act as responsible adults that even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the government should do something about.
Harold MacMillan couldn't have been more wrong. "Events" are the least of it.