Clash of Civilizations
A good article in the Wall Street Journal about a recently-passed Harvard professor who tried to shine the light of reality on the post-Soviet world.
I agree with some of his precepts, though I find it amusing that he considered the ongoing unpleasantness in Iraq a form of "conservative imperialism." I call it a self-destructive opposite of imperialism. I suppose we’re using the words differently, but I don’t consider trying to gift a people with something that has to be earned – namely, democracy – a form of imperialism in any way. I just see it as daft and pointless.
This, however, is spot on:
The inimitable John Keegan argued in A History of Warfare that war is basically cultural in origin, not socio-economic as Clausewitz had insisted. At the time I read that book I was still in the military, and having been steeped in the Clausewitzian dogma of the modern Western military mindset, I found his arguments disturbing but ultimately (so I thought) specious. Recent matters have, in my mind, proven Keegan's point in the most iron-clad fashion imaginable.
It’s a truism of the Abrahimic faiths that they love war almost as much as their God. The fact that we as a nation have pointedly and stupidly refused to acknowledge Islam as the real enemy – and our role in their attacks on us – is not a good sign for this latest iteration of the Crusades. The Moors are once again shouldering into Europe, and by extension America. Whether we modern, self-styled egalitarians of the West like to be lumped together as "the Christian world" or not is utterly irrelevant; it’s the role in which we’ve been cast, so we’d best play it at the peak of our abilities. I wonder how long it’ll take the descendants of the Christian knights (that'd be us) to get our goals aligned this time around and start running the Moors back to their deserts.
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(Hat-tip to Vizigoth)
I agree with some of his precepts, though I find it amusing that he considered the ongoing unpleasantness in Iraq a form of "conservative imperialism." I call it a self-destructive opposite of imperialism. I suppose we’re using the words differently, but I don’t consider trying to gift a people with something that has to be earned – namely, democracy – a form of imperialism in any way. I just see it as daft and pointless.
This, however, is spot on:
"The relations between Islam and Christianity, both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity."
The inimitable John Keegan argued in A History of Warfare that war is basically cultural in origin, not socio-economic as Clausewitz had insisted. At the time I read that book I was still in the military, and having been steeped in the Clausewitzian dogma of the modern Western military mindset, I found his arguments disturbing but ultimately (so I thought) specious. Recent matters have, in my mind, proven Keegan's point in the most iron-clad fashion imaginable.
It’s a truism of the Abrahimic faiths that they love war almost as much as their God. The fact that we as a nation have pointedly and stupidly refused to acknowledge Islam as the real enemy – and our role in their attacks on us – is not a good sign for this latest iteration of the Crusades. The Moors are once again shouldering into Europe, and by extension America. Whether we modern, self-styled egalitarians of the West like to be lumped together as "the Christian world" or not is utterly irrelevant; it’s the role in which we’ve been cast, so we’d best play it at the peak of our abilities. I wonder how long it’ll take the descendants of the Christian knights (that'd be us) to get our goals aligned this time around and start running the Moors back to their deserts.
___
(Hat-tip to Vizigoth)
posted by Jar(egg)head at 11:37
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