From: "Mark" 

V.D. Hanson has an article out today that compliments the one (thanks) you
posted Don:

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson022206.html
He concludes: "After the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein,
the furious reply of the radical Islamist world was to censor Western
newspapers, along with Iran's accelerated efforts to get the bomb.

In response, either the West will continue to stand up now to these
reoccurring post-Sept. 11 threats, or it will see the bullies' demands only
increase as its own resistance weakens. Like the appeasement of the 1930s,
opting for the easier choice will only guarantee a more costly one later
on."


"Don Hills"  wrote in message
news:/2R/DtgaXeAS092yn{at}attglobal.net...
> 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...
>
> --
> Don Hills    (dmhills at attglobaldotnet)     Wellington, New Zealand
> "New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
> preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
>    -- Advertisement on the box for Microsoft Windows 2.11 for 286

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