From: Ellen K. 

A keeper, thanks.

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:28:15 +1200, black.hole.4.spam{at}gmail.com (Don Hills)
wrote in message :

>Something in this one for almost everyone here:
>
>http://www.sydneyline.com/Adversary%20Culture.htm
>
>The perverse anti-Westernism of the cultural elite
>Keith Windschuttle
>
>"For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in
>our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as,
>at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed.
>Before the 1960s, if Western intellectuals reflected on the long-term
>achievements of their culture, they explained it in terms of its own
>evolution: the inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity,
>tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the
>scientific and industrial revolutions. Even a radical critique like Marxism
>was primarily an internal affair, intent on fulfilling what it imagined to
>be the destiny of the West, taking its history to what it thought would be a
>higher level.
>
>Today, however, such thinking is dismissed by the prevailing intelligentsia
>as triumphalist. Western political and economic dominance is more commonly
>explained not by its internal dynamics but by its external behaviour,
>especially its rivalry and aggression towards other cultures. Western
>success has purportedly been at their expense. Instead of pushing for
>internal reform or revolution, this new radicalism constitutes an
>overwhelmingly negative critique of Western civilization itself.
>
>According to this ideology, instead of attempting to globalise its values,
>the West should stay in its own cultural backyard. Values like universal
>human rights, individualism and liberalism are regarded merely as
>ethnocentric products of Western history. The scientific knowledge that the
>West has produced is simply one of many "ways of knowing". In place of
>Western universalism, this critique offers cultural relativism, a concept
>that regards the West not as the pinnacle of human achievement to date, but
>as simply one of many equally valid cultural systems."
>
>...
>
>"... Let me demonstrate some of the ways in which national and imperial
>histories are being used to denigrate Western culture and society and give
>the nations of the West, especially those descended from Britain, an
>historical identity of which they can only be ashamed."
>
>...
>
>" Academic historians today argue that all the new white settler societies
>established under the British Empire in Africa, the Pacific and North
>America shared the same racist attitudes towards outsiders and dispensed the
>same degree of violence against indigenous peoples. Today, they often
>compare the European settler societies with Nazi Germany."
>
>...
>
>"The anti-colonialism of these historians is also highly selective
in that it
>ignores empires other than those of Europe. The truth is that all great
>civilizations have absorbed other peoples, sometimes in harmony, sometimes
>by the sword. The Islamic world, so often portrayed today as victims of
>British or American or Israeli imperialism, is hardly innocent. The Ottoman
>Turks conquered and ruled most of the Middle East for a thousand years. The
>British and the French displaced them in the nineteenth and early twentieth
>century, with the approval of the Arabs who by then wanted liberation from
>Ottoman rule. In India, Muslims from Arabia and Persia were imperial
>overlords for eight centuries until the British arrived. The British
>overthrew Muslim rule, with the active co-operation and grateful applause of
>the Hindu population.
>
>The Arabs themselves were not indigenous to most of the regions they now
>populate. Before the Turks, they were an imperial power who arose out of the
>Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century to conquer the Middle East, North
>Africa, South Asia and Southern Europe where they either subjugated or
>slaughtered the local population. None of this history provokes any censure
>from the critics of imperialism today, who reserve their reproaches
>exclusively for the European variety."
>
>...
>
>
>"Fortunately, we now have an analysis that convincingly demolishes claims of
>this kind. Niall Ferguson's 2003 book Empire is a history of British
>imperialism which demonstrates that Britain 's imperial record is not merely
>nothing to be ashamed of, but was a positive force that "made the modern
>world". The history of the empire was characterized by the global spread of
>trade and wealth, technological and cultural modernization, and the growth
>of liberalism and democracy.
>
>Imperialism encouraged investors to put their money in developing economies,
>places that would otherwise have been sites of great risk. The extension of
>the British empire into the less developed world had the effect of reducing
>this risk by imposing some form of British rule.
>
>When the British Empire was at the peak of its influence, it was a much
>greater force for international investment in the underdeveloped world than
>any of today's institutions. In 1913, some 25 per cent of the world stock of
>capital was invested in poor countries. By 1997 that figure was only 5 per
>cent."
>
>...
>
>"The aftermath to the assaults on New York and Washington on September 11
>2001 provided a stark illustration of its values. Within days of the
>terrorist assault, a number of influential Western intellectuals, including
>Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag and youthful counterparts such as Naomi Klein of
>the anti-globalisation protest movement, responded in ways that, morally and
>symbolically, were no different to the celebrations of the crowds on the
>streets of Palestine and Islamabad who cheered as they watched the towers of
>the World Trade Centre come crashing down. Stripped of its obligatory
>jargon, their argument was straightforward: America deserved what it got.
>
>Perhaps the worst single response to September 11 was made, I am sorry to
>say, by an Australian. In his column in the London magazine New Statesman,
>John Pilger said the real terrorists were not Muslim radicals but the
>Americans themselves. Pilger wrote:
>
>    If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who
>    can be surprised? ? Far from being the terrorists of the world, the
>    Islamic peoples have been its victims - that is, the victims of American
>    fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms - military, strategic and
>    economic - is the greatest source of terrorism on earth."
>
>...
>
>"The truth is that the riots, the arson, the death threats were not
>spontaneous outbursts from passionate religious believers but were carefully
>stage-managed by Muslim leaders. The imams of the Danish Muslim community
>consciously ignited the response some four months after the cartoons were
>published. They travelled to the Middle East where they generated support
>for a campaign quite deliberately targeted at Western culture's principle of
>freedom of expression.
>
>Their real aim is not religious respect but cultural change in the West.
>They want to prevent criticism of its Muslim minority and accord that group
>special privilege not available to the faithful of other religions. Instead
>of them changing to integrate into our way of life, they want to force us to
>change to accept their way of life."
>
>...
>
>"The Western concept of freedom of speech is not an absolute. The
limits that
>should be imposed by good taste, social responsibility and respect for
>others will always be a matter for debate. But this is a debate that needs
>to be conducted within Western culture, not imposed on it from outside by
>threats of death and violence by those who want to put an end to all free
>debate.
>
>The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise
>entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost
>part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western
>phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under
>Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth
>century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first
>thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress
>it.
>
>But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would
>have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers
>profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great
>personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their
>reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued
>free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue.
>
>Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians
>outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture
>within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the
>West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s
>has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to
>resist.
>
>The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to
>oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of
>free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the
>intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their
>enemies."
>
>----------------------------------
>
>That's about a third of it...

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