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December 13, 2006
Spengler's grim message
Are you feeling a little more hopeful about the world as this year draws to a close in a glow of Yule tide cheer? Then you haven't read Spengler's take on why things are worse than you think.
Issues that seem trivial and even grotesque to Westerners, such as the veiling of women, are life-and-death matters for the survival of Islam, as Muslims in the West know better than their Western critics.
Christianity recruits individual souls into a new Israel: Islam enlists converts into an army to defend traditional life against the depredations of encroaching empires. Islam cannot withstand the final dissolution of traditional society that comes with the triumph of globalization. Its entire raison d'etre is a stubborn refusal to adapt, in the fashion that the Chinese have adapted, to a new world with new ground rules.
To intervene in the Islamic world is to hasten the dissolution of traditional society and with it the world of Islam. For all his good intentions, Bush appears to Iraqis as the worst thing to visit them since the Mongols in the 14th century.
[...]
By and large American Christians do not understand what it is that makes them Christians, and why their religion has flourished while European Christianity has perished. Once having abandoned their own culture by becoming American, Americans cease to understand why others will die rather than let their culture be stripped from them.
Because American Christians do not quite understand what they are, they cannot understand what makes Muslims so different. Bush, Rice and other well-meaning American Christians will operate on the presumption that Muslims can be persuaded to act like them, with tragic consequences.
It is not what the United States does that threatens Islam, but rather what the United States is: a global avalanche of creative destruction that rips apart the bindings of traditional life. The US has offered a world in which traditional society has no place. The portions of the world that have turned their back to the sword's edge face chaos. An endearing quality of the Americans is that they find the truth too horrible to contemplate.
Therein we see the essential problem: the most distinctive of American qualities -- our innate optimism -- blinds us to the intractable nature of this civilizational-conceptual conflict.
We don't understand that the very things that we champion -- equality, individual liberty, tolerance -- are loathsome, poisonous to traditional (read: Muslim) societies. Much as we want -- no, need to believe that we're all the same, that everyone will negotiate in good faith, peaceful coexistence the goal, the unbearable-to-Americans truth is that we cannot give them what they want.
For the only thing that will satisfy our enemies in this most existential of conflicts is our complete and utter destruction.
Merry Christmas.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 13, 2006 10:57 PM
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