http://www.geertwilders.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1740&Itemid=1
I have said this before in regards to Wilders, but it bears repeating. To an American's ears, it is an uncomfortable thought saying that Western civilization is superior to other civilizations. In America, the popular academic trend is what we term, Post-Colonial thought, which basically bashes Western Civilization as a historic oppressor while maintaining that all cultures are equal. Multi-culturalism-spelled with a capital M is part and parcel of that ideology.
Personally, I don't think that Western civilization is better than say, Japanese civilization, which, in my view, the Japanese people are amply demonstrating in the face of their recent catastrophe. We could learn a lesson in civics from the Japanese. On the other hand, is Japanese culture superior to the culture of the head-hunters of Borneo? Of course. As for comparing all the rest, I'll leave that to you the reader and Wilders.
8 comments:
Is not Western Civilization based on Christianity and Japanese civilization based on emperor worship?
I may be in error, but when I think of Western Civilization spreading its ideas, I am referring to the Protestant Reformation.
Roman Catholicism loarding over the nations of the earth is not what I had in mind.
The Reformers ideas were strictly Christian, with a few Puritans in America taking it to the extreme, however, the freedoms Christianity has brought is not in comparison to any other.
Are those Muslims going to be protesting anywhere in OC soon?
We expect the MSU at UCI to hold their annual Israel Apartheid Week sometime in May. We don't have a date yet.
The question of whether multi-culturalism means all cultures are equal should be looked at in the same light as the misconception that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution establishes that all religions are equally valid and true. It does no such thing.
The first two clauses of the First Amendment acknowledge that the instrument of government is incompetent to determine or decree which, if any, religion is true and valid. Therefore, it constrains the laws of the Republic, and since ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the laws of the constituent states, from taking or enforcing a position on this possibly vital question.
Multi-culturalism similarly should respect the right of individuals to make their own cultural choices, provided these do not oppress their neighbors. It is the right of every culture to compete in the free market place of ideas, not to an official seal of approval.
Freedom of religion does not, of course, justify the practice of human sacrifice, since that practice treads rather sharply on the rights of the individual who is murdered -- and murder it is, beyond the protection of the First Amendment. Similarly, multi-culturalism entitled any given culture to neither respect as ipso facto "good," nor to concessions by others who adhere to different cultures. Neither is ANY culture, merely because it is a culture, entitled to deference or exemption from common civil law.
Freedom of religion was, in the period 1781-1820 or later, a radical innovation within Christian tradition, Roman Catholic or Protestant, and is similarly at odds with many Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, to some extent even Jewish traditions, in which religious authority and the state are merged. Any religion in the modern world must come to terms with the fact that the citizenry, not the religious leadership, are sovereign.
Siarlys,
You should brush up on freedom of conscience of the founding fathers by reading on the Protestant Reformation.
Gary,
I will look for that date. Do people who know what Islam really is go to those rally's, or is it too hostile? However, it is the hostility that will bring media attention to examine Islam.
I go to as many as I can. Last May, we saw about 2-300 community members come and show the US and Israeli flags. No disruption or confrontation-just standing up for the good guys. Its great when we ask challenging questions. Last year we exposed Malik Ali on YouTube as the hate monger and terrorist sympathizer he is (hamas, Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad). Of course, these things were already known.
Your Foundering Truth:
You must be new here. Gary says I know everything about history. He exaggerates, but I have read a good deal about the Reformation, and I know the difference between Luther, Muenzer, Zwingli, Calvin, and John Wycliffe, the difference between all of the above and John Wesley, and between Wesley and George Whitefield. I know that Calvin ran a vicious ham-fisted dictatorship in Geneva and gratuitously burned people at the stake, and the Puritans were burning witches when they should have been saving souls.
Now, instead of blithely telling me to do some "reading on" the Reformation, why don't you stop hiding behind trivia, and tell us forthrightly what YOU know, what conclusions YOUR reading on the Reformation leads you to, how you apply that to today... and then I will be happy to answer whatever you come up with.
Do your homework child, and we adults will begin to take you seriously.
Siarlys,
I appreciate that you are basically a self-taught man. However, it seems to me that you have studied a lot of history without gaining any lessons from it. Forget about Alexander the Great and Hammurabi for a minute because the important lessons to be learned from history were in the 20th century.
First was WW 1, which was a senseless war fought basically because an assassination in Sarajevo dragged in a bunch of countries who had forged alliances. What the hell was it fought for?
The second lesson was WW 2-more specifically Adolf Hitler. The lesson was that the free world should have stopped Hitler in his tracks when it became clear that he intended to establish a brutal dictatorship over all of Europe. Instead they let him reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936 and take the Sudetenland in 1938 (Munich).
That is where we are today. We have a choice. Are we going to continue to accommodate radical Islam?
Also, I don't see the purpose in referring to Founding Truth as a child.
I refer to Founding Truth as a child because, to paraphrase Paul, he speaks like a child. More precisely, he tosses off epithets like a child standing in a school yard wagging his hands behind his ears, he drops passing comments implying that anyone whose viewpoint he doesn't like is an ignorant fool, but does not offer a serious discourse on what HE believes study of the Reformation would lead a rational reader to recognize.
When he presents the facts he relies on, rather than implying that anyone who read up on the subject would know them, then presents his argument, I may disagree with him, but I will no longer refer to him as a child. I will answer him in the same spirit of informed debate.
Your references to WW I and WW II are germane, but they lead to opposite conclusions. As I've said before, pundits as well as military officers are always ready to fight the last war.
Because WW I was indeed senseless slaughter, everyone was VERY hesitant to go to war against Hitler -- even though several years and millions of deaths later, we realized that moving early, he would have been easy to stop, and had his heart in his mouth wondering if anyone would have the guts to do so.
Because we learned THAT lesson in WW II, we spent twenty years getting deeper and deeper into Vietnam, maintaining we had learned the lesson of Munich, except we were fighting people who more than not were deeply committed to Ho Chi Minh -- further, Ho could have been OUR ally. He mad his greatest advances when cut off from Moscow, and hated having to deal with Stalin. He borrowed from our Declaration of Independence when writing his own.
Now, we know that expecting to be welcomed as liberators in Iraq, and establishing a happy neocon state, was foolish hubris. So, we have people announcing that we should not intervene in Libya, where a vicious despot was about to slaughter civilians who had risen up against him without any instigation from us. (You've documented the lack of instigation rather well).
So, the threat of those Muslims who advocate a world wide caliphate is what it is, not an exact analogy to anything else. If we pull out of Afghanistan, which you and I have both advocated, chances are good that people who think like that will take over again. Shall we fight to the last drop of blood to stop them?
We are not in a position where we can march troops into a couple of demilitarized zones and stop the jihad in its tracks. On the other hand, they don't really have the legitimacy of a government, and they are not successful in portraying themselves as a national liberation movement. So, its more like fighting semi-popular drug cartels than like stopping Hitler in the Rhineland.
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