From: black.hole.4.spam{at}gmail.com (Don Hills)

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."

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That's about a third of it...

--
Don Hills    (dmhills at attglobaldotnet)     Wellington, New Zealand
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