An excerpt from a brilliant article by Harvey Mansfield in The Weekly Standard: Courage in the raw, physical sense is the noble ability to control one's fear and terror of bodily pains. When Aristotle said that the noblest courage is to confront death in battle, he implied that society depends on this individual virtue. Courage as a virtue practiced for its own sake is not undertaken to defend society, but society needs it and must cultivate and reward it. Now, modern materialism is an attempt to avoid depending on virtue generally and, especially, on courage.
Read it all.
Modern materialism rests on self-preservation or the right to life, in which survival is paramount. But one can never be courageous with such an attitude, for courage requires willingness to sacrifice one's life for something higher, for a noble life. That is why modern democracies have such difficulty defending themselves. They require a virtue that is not explained or justified in their principle. The Declaration of Independence begins by setting forth rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and stating that all men are created equal. But it ends with a vow in which the signers mutually pledge their sacred honor to one another.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Solzhenitsyn and courage...
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Honor killings, non-Christian England, plants' rights...
Articles worth reading:
The Silent Scream of the Asparagus
Honor Killing Victim Wanted to Live Like other German Girls
"If recent reports of trends in religious observance prove to be correct, then in some 30 years the mosque will be able to claim that, religiously speaking, the UK is an Islamic nation, and therefore needs a share in any religious establishment to reflect this."
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Austria, Fritzl and Evil.
À propos the post below, here's an interesting article written by the perspicacious Theodore Dalrymple, that addresses the issue of knowledge of neighbor and wife alike regarding the horrors the Fritzl children and grandchildren experienced:It was inevitable, I suppose, that the ignorance both of Frau Fritzl and of the townspeople of the evil taking place under the very eyes, as it were, or in the midst of their placid, well-ordered and comfortable existence, should have been taken as a real-life metaphor for Austria’s attitude to its own past: for, in fact, no one really believes in his heart that either Frau Fritzl or the people of Amstetten could have been genuinely and totally ignorant of what had been going there on for so long. No, they both knew and did not know, or rather chose not to know: and choosing not to know something implies a degree of knowledge of it. Their ignorance, if such it can be called, of Herr Fritzl and his cellar was culpable.
German leftist extremism.
Germany's domestic intelligence agency has warned of "extremist structures" within the Left Party. A new report lists a number of left-wing extremist factions within the party, including the Communist Platform, the Marxist Forum and a pro-Cuba group.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Britannia lost the waves...
International law gone amuck?
"THE Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights (because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.)
Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain."
Thanks to Tigerhawk.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Kipling and Rick Rescorla.
Reading PowerLine's post on Kipling brought back the sadness, awe, and redemptory feelings I had after 9/11 when I discovered the man who was Rick Rescorla. Kipling is still relevant today as he ever was. Rick Rescorla is a man for all seasons. Go read the whole post. You won't regret it.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Where's the British pride?
RAF personnel ordered not to wear uniforms in public after suffering abuse in the street. They serve their country with pride and are ready to put their lives on the line.
Yet RAF personnel have been repaid with volleys of abuse in the street.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Irish terrorism.
From Strategy Page: The IRA has devolved into a criminal gang, but al Qaeda, and other Islamic radical groups have found Ireland a convenient place to hide out and plan their next atrocity. The Irish economy has been booming for the last decade, and suffering an ongoing labor shortage. If Islamic radicals can slip into the country, they can find work, and cover in the many immigrant neighborhoods.
The regression of the West:
This is happening today in the UK. Children brides-to-be. Where are the feminists...
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
They "are going to win, because [we] love life and [they] love death...
At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
An Archbishop of Canterbury Tale...
Heere Bigynneth the Tale of the Asse-Hatte. It's brilliant and Chauceresque! Check out Iowahawk.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Assimilation is a crime against humanity.
So says Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He added that "ethnic Turks abroad should be more confident in standing up for their interests, and should win election as mayors and members of European national parliaments."
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Good grief...
From the BBC: The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".
Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4's World at One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.
Good grief!
The British government ...has drawn up a controversial phrasebook on the language of terrorism and is insisting civil servants no longer blame fanatical extremism on Islam, for fear of upsetting the Muslim community.
The new counter-terrorism guidelines suggest that phrases such as "Islamic terrorist" and "jihadi fundamentalism" are too inflammatory and imply that all Muslims explicitly are responsible for extremism.
Instead the leaked Home Office document advises Whitehall bosses that they refer to violent extremism and criminal murderers or thugs to avoid any link between Islam and terrorism.
Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations and...
his conclusions regarding the implications of such clash for the west: THIS ARTICLE DOES not argue that civilization identities will replace all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight each other. This paper does set forth the hypotheses that differences between civilizations are real and important; civilization-consciousness is increasing; conflict between civilizations will supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form of conflict; international relations, historically a game played out within Western civilization, will increasingly be de-Westernized and become a game in which non-Western civilizations are actors and not simply objects; successful political, security and economic international institutions are more likely to develop within civilizations than across civilizations; conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between "the West and the Rest"; the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.
This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is necessary to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications should be divided between short-term advantage and long-term accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of counter military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions.
In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western civilization will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.
Clash of Civilizations revisited.
There was a fantastic article in The New York Times a month ago, by Fouad Ajami, in which he revisits Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and decides that Huntington was, presciently, quite correct in his assessment. Samuel Huntington observed that “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.”
Ajami concludes that Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no “universal civilization,” Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called “Davos culture,” consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.
Read it all!!!
**************
It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations — Western Europe being one example, Russia another — and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.
***************
The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
The child-men phenomenon.
"Once upon a time, video games were for little boys and girls—well, mostly little boys—who loved their Nintendos so much, the lament went, that they no longer played ball outside. Those boys have grown up to become child-man gamers, turning a niche industry into a $12 billion powerhouse."
Fascinating article on the problem with the child-men who are not "very promising husbands and fathers [because] they suffer from a proverbial “fear of commitment,” another way of saying that they can’t stand to think of themselves as permanently attached to one woman."
Read the whole article here.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Of cannibalism, society and man:
General Butt Naked confesses to killing some 20,000 people before finding himself standing nude in battle on a bridge outside Monrovia and hearing the voice of God tell him he was Satan's slave and should repent immediately. Since when he's been an evangelical preacher in Ghana.
Read the whole Mark Steyn article.
And we shrug and move on. Hey, it's Liberia. Back in 2000, the country's Ministry of Information had hailed President Charles Taylor for the ease of access he offered to his people "so that everyone will at least have the opportunity to have the ears of the Chief Executive, instead of a select few." By contrast, only a select few got the opportunity to have the ears of the previous Chief Executive, Samuel Doe. He'd fallen into the hands of Prince Johnson, one of Charles Taylor's allies in the battle to unseat him. "That man won't talk!" barked Johnson. "Bring me his ear!" So the boys sliced off his left ear, and then the right, and made the president eat them.
But the lads kept the best bits for themselves. They removed His Excellency's genitals and chowed down in the belief that the "powers" and "manhood" of the person whose parts you're eating are transferred to the eater. A New York returned to a Hobbesian state of nature is a delicious fantasy because it's so remote, but in Liberia who needs the movies? They're living it — right down to the whole Quentin Tarantino "Stuck In The Middle With You" menu options. And when it turns up on page 37 of the newspaper we give it nary a thought because who expects anything of West Africa anyway?
Liberia's not a "victim" of European colonization. Founded by freed American slaves, its first republic lasted from 1847 until Samuel Doe's coup in 1980. In the seventies, before nude warlords came a-rampaging, Monrovian bigwigs didn't merely pull their pants on before swaggering forth, they favoured morning dress of an anachronistic gentility reminiscent of the antebellum South.
In other words, Liberia went backwards.
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