GABlog

VDH blogs on perpetual victimhood:

This was the one recent chance when the United States backed its lofty rhetoric with real sacrifice in the Middle East—but so far the moment is passing and will be replaced by something far worse if it fails. Just remember, should democratization falter, none of us will ever worry much about the cries for reform and democracy from a then truly whiny Arab dissident population, who flees to the West to damn the West for not doing what they themselves, in the manner of our own Founding Fathers, should have done long ago on their own. Nothing to the American character is more grating than perpetual scapegoating for self-induced pathologies, along with constant whining and victimization—and nowhere is that syndrome more common than in the radical Islamic Middle East.

–CSM

…by playing in accord with his own rules.  More precisely:  we demand an apology from every Muslim cleric, every Muslim head of state, every Muslim legislator, editorialist, you name it, who has incited violence against the Pope, being as we see this as a direct attack on our civilization.  And if the apology is refused…well, they know better than anyone the consequences.  We can just choose at random one of the psychopathic placards from an equally randomly selected “protest” to determine the proper punishment.

 The emerging question among those serious about our enemy (i.e., not liberals and leftists) is whether the view that we are fighting “extremists” who have “distorted” an otherwise “peaceful” or at least “reformable” religion remains sustainable, even as a polite fiction–or, are we simply at war with Islam?  My view has been, and remains, that we should defer this question for as long as possible, and meanwhile craft policies which will be effective regardless of what the answer turns out to be; and policies that, furthermore, will supply us with data that will ultimately enable us to answer, when we have no choice.  For this very reason we need to take actions that let us see whether your average Imam who screams “Death to America” every Friday does so because he knows there is no price to be paid and a cheaply won popularity to be gained, or whether he indeed wishes to “engage” us.  We must begin to force the question, in other words, even as we continue to defer any definitive answer.

 Scenic Politics

Spengler continues his hilariously abusive analysis of American resentment (which I offer not with unqualified endorsement but mostly for your amusement):

Americans who grew up in the 1950s and afterward remain in a perpetual childhood of peer identification, hostile to all authority.

That is not quite true, I concluded in the August 29 essay; most Americans acknowledge the Bible as a supreme authority. But that is not quite the case if the Bible is to be taken “literally”, that is, the way an ignorant man would read it on the surface. In that case, the authority is not the Bible at all, but rather the authority of the ignoramus who reads it. This writer accepts the authority of the Bible, but confesses his inability to understand most of it without the assistance of learned commentators. Paradoxically, biblical literalism is a resentment-driven revolt against authority.

David Pryce-Jones today on 9/11:

What 9/11 proves is the resentment that a sizable proportion of the Muslim world feels against the West. No doubt this resentment is a complex compound of hate and love, envy and rejection, shame and pride, and outsiders can probably never quite get the measure of it. Nevertheless the resentment drives Muslims in quite significant numbers to kill Westerners even if that means laying down their own lives.

Millions more Muslims evidently consider these Islamist extremists to be heroes and martyrs, even if they would not themselves kill and be killed. Far from taking the lead in condemning such killing as crime that has nothing to do with religious faith, Muslim clerics and preachers tend to justify or excuse it, solidifying resentment. The mindset therefore spreads throughout the Muslim world that the West has a deliberate policy to wipe out Islam. In the five years since 9/11, Islamists everywhere have made great progress in establishing another of the great simplistic, indeed absolutely false, Us-and-Them divides.

…

Listen to Winston Churchill, a far-sighted observer, writing in 1899 about Islam, or Mohammedanism as it was then called. “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science…the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.� Leading Muslim thinkers at that time had already reached this conclusion. Science, they held, was something that the West had up its sleeve, like some sort of trick, to give it quite unfair power and glory.

Throughout the 20th century, Arab and Muslim countries could have utilized science to build nation-states with education and health systems that would have made them the equals of the West, and also made resentment redundant. Instead, the search for the missing power and glory brought wars and civil wars, generating failure, and with it much more of that overpowering sense of resentment. There is nothing any non-Muslim can do about it. Liberation of the spirit, rationality, has to come from within.

On 9/11 Islamists exploited the aeronautical products of science against the West which had manufactured what they themselves could not. Not that they lacked creativity, needless to say, only that their society had been too irrationally organized to allow for its expression. The irrationality is as prevalent as ever, and managing to occupy the driving seat of the emerging Us-and-Them universe. Pakistan has the nuclear bomb. At regular intervals, Iran announces the test of yet more and varied missiles, and nobody doubts that it is in the process of surreptitiously making its nuclear bomb. To pursue Churchill’s image, Islam is now sheltering in the strong arms of science. Resentment plus bomb equals danger to the whole world. 9/11 wrote that equation, and apparently nobody knows if or how it can be resolved.

– CSM

Here’s an essay that raises the level of discussion, in many ways; note, also, its call for “anthropology” (even though it means that more in the sense of “ethnography”):

http://www.policyreview.org/000/corn2.html

 

And, here, we have a wide ranging, sophisticated discussion that surfaces some friendly disagreements that might have long term consequences among those devoted to renewing their stake in Western civilization:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24274 

http://www.newenglishreview.org/