The
Enemy within - Islam and Western Civilization
The article below, written by a Russian journalist, pictures
the contest between the West and Islam as a clash of someone suicidal being confronted
by someone intent on murdering him.
There is no contest; they both agree on the outcome! (One party dies) He contends that the West’s postmodern
liberals hate their own society as much as Islam does. He states, “It is difficult to find more
hatred of the West, than in the West itself”.
What is this phenomenon of self-hate? How can we explain it? It would be easy to look at the growing
scourge of liberalism and conclude that it is the cause of America’s and the
West’s maladies. But if we’re honest we
will look a little deeper. We will see
that liberalism is not really the cause; it’s more of a symptom.
It’s a complex issue that shouldn’t be
over-simplified but for the sake of time I’ll just offer a few insights. The soul of America is the Church. America was founded and blessed to advance
the kingdom of God. Along the way, very
successful in its mission, we and the world, have
prospered immensely. But slowly,
generation after generation we have lost much of our goodness, spiritual vigor,
and clarity of vision. A faithlessness has overtaken American and the Church. We have been losing our spiritual life and
replacing it with natural counterfeits.
Often well intentioned, this human counterfeit of spiritual power is
often called humanism or liberalism. At
its core, liberalism is a faulty human response to a real or perceived
need. It replaces God with government,
and rather than promoting individual excellence it encourages human dependence
(leading to slavery). It has a faithless
view of the world. So, as once noble
governments and societies become corrupt, liberalism rushes in to fill that
void.
America has lost its way because the Church has lost
its way. Today America is a mixture;
great good, but also great evil. This is
the state where a ‘body’ may become ‘diseased’.
It may begin to kill itself by one form or another. It is nature’s (God’s) way of dealing with
dysfunctional systems.
Often the seed of disease is present long before it
begins to proliferate. In a healthy body
the immune system keeps rouge elements in check, but in a weakened state, or
under unusual stress, the body cannot defend itself adequately and disease begins
to metastasize and eventually overwhelms the very organism that gives it life.
Can we relate this to America, and more specifically
the Church? What is the dysfunction that
permits liberalism in our case, which is very active in both Church and state, to
metastasize and spread until the body has a full blown, perhaps even fatal,
disease? Until the body, whether it is
the Church or America, begins to self destruct?
Please read the article below and think about the internal
sins that are weakening the Church. Not
the symptoms but the root causes. And
what is the solution! In my next
article, I will pinpoint one silent killer that is often overlooked, especially
during prosperous times. It has become a
fixture in Christian society – just assumed to be part of the landscape.
A
pinnacle of self-destruction
Can a tango of a murderer and a
suicide be considered “The Clash of Civilizations”?
By
Alexander Maistrovoy, a journalist with the
Russian-language Israeli newspaper Novosty nedely.
It is difficult to say which civilizations Samuel Huntington
meant by the clash of civilizations. Those who think he wrote about Islamic
civilization on the one part and the West on the other part, make a mistake.
There is no such conflict, it is inherently impossible. The events of the
latest decades show that the civilizations in question are far from clashing. On
the contrary, they co-operate and complement one another.
Any conflict assumes that both parties have ideological
oppositions, pride, courage, and desire to fight. If one of the parties has
neither principles, nor will to resist, or at least aspirations to survive, the
conflict does not exist. There is a simple absorption of one civilization by
another, a kind of submission or assault. The situation becomes even more
hopeless if one of the parties not only obediently submits to an aggressor and
tyrant, but meets the conqueror with readiness and enthusiasm.
Can there be a conflict between a sadist and a masochist; hatred and
self-hatred; aggression and self-flagellation? Certainly not.
Such pairs complement one another ideally.
It is difficult to find more hatred of the West, than in the
West itself. Listen and read what the
representatives of the Western elite - academicians, novelists and
show-business stars - say, and you will find no difference in their ideas and
those of the leaders of Taliban or “Al Qaeda”. Do the judgments of Tom Hayden
differ from those of Mukdata al Sadr?
Is Noam Chomsky or Susan Sontag different in their statements on the USA from
Mullah Omar? Sean Penn hates America as strongly as the Islamists do.
“Washington prepares genocide in Afghanistan … The plan is
ready, and will be carried out even if it causes the destruction of several
million people within the next several months. But it excites nobody”. It was
told shortly after 9/11. By whom? Perhaps,
by Bin-Laden or Ayman Zawahiri?
No, it was told by Noam Chomsky, a liberals’ idol on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Who described 9/11 as a “natural result of culture of
violence, hunger and brutal exploitation”? It was a Nobel Prize Laureate Dario Fo. Who enthusiastically, with certain ecstasy and
voluptuousness, wrote after the bloody orgy: “America, now it’s your turn to
understand how ruthless hatred can be!”? It was neither Mahmud Ahmedinedzhad, nor Nasralla nor Bashar Asad. These words belong
to a popular British short-story writer Martin Louis Amis.
Here is the statement of a French
philosopher Jean Baudrillard, one of the pillars of Postmodernism: “
It was “Al Qaeda” who did it but we had longed for it”.
And what about professors? Could the rhetoric of Osama Bin-Laden be compared with
triumphal delight of Dr. Richard Berthold from University of New Mexico after
9/11: “Anybody who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote”.
David C. Hendrickson, a professor at Colorado College, compared
George W. Bush to Stalin. Poor Stalin … A refined sadist and pathological
murderer, he would turn in his grave if he heard the professor. To be compared
to Bush, who had not managed to destroy a handful of badly armed terrorists in
Baghdad for five years. If Stalin’s Red Army had occupied Baghdad, not
only terrorists, but Baghdad itself would have stopped their existence in a
week’s time. And not a single one of the present liberals would have uttered a
word of protest. The reason for it is: they admire force, and Stalin was the
embodiment of force.
The weak-willed politics of the present Western leaders is
just a number of attempts to appease aggressors. It is the reflection of
servility and worship of force that impregnates the cultural establishment of
the West.
The liberals’ passionate hatred of their own civilization
reminds us of revolutionaries - communists and anarchists of the beginning of
the last century - and their hatred of capitalism. At first sight we observe a certain ideological continuity.
However, the initial impression is deceptive. Lenin, Trotsky and their
followers had quite distinct political aims: firstly, full “redistribution” of
property and its transfer it to the new “proletarian” elite; secondly, the
world revolution and world supremacy. The first task was completely fulfilled.
All of the czarist Russia elite: aristocracy, nobility and merchants were
either killed or expelled. Stalin came close to the fulfillment of the second
task. However, the inconsistent economic policy and the system crisis which
struck the former USSR, prevented the realization of
this grandiose plan.
What are the aims of the Western liberal elite? There are none. There is no need to expropriate anybody
because, contrary to the Russian marginal-revolutionaries, they belong to
ruling establishment. As for the second purpose, their dominant position allows
them to effectively and successfully promote liberal values to the most gloomy
and musty corners of the modern world. Instead they consistently and
purposefully destroy foundations of their own civilization, support the most
ominous forces which dream of destruction of a free society.
There is one more essential moment. Revolutionaries of the
beginning of the 20th century were representatives of national minorities
(Jews, Germans, Poles, Latvian, Georgians, Chinese).
They despised Russia and Russian culture because they themselves were
considered to be men of the meaner sort. On the contrary, the Western liberals
are one hundred-per-cent Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards who
according to the logic of things have no reason to hate their countries and
wish their destruction. Nevertheless,
they are afflicted with desire to see their culture writhing in agony at the
feet of triumphing Islamic fanatics and ordinary gangsters and demagogues of
Hugo Chavez and his kind.
So, we see a case of causeless, self-destructive hatred.
This senseless and absolutely irrational self-hatred could be explained by only
one thing: the suicide syndrome characteristic of cultures in their last stage
of dying. In lack of ideals, vital forces, and even instinct of
self-preservation they surrender themselves to barbarians, with flattering and
even masochistic humility give themselves up to rough and despotic conquerors.
… When Alaric entered
Rome, he was amazed by a great number of Romans who like Germans wore bears
skins and worshiped German idols. Rome had submitted to barbarians long before
it fell to their hands. There’s a paradox in the fact that Alaric, Theodoric,
and other German leaders did their best to preserve the heritage of ancient
Rome. However, one can never expect the same from future conquerors of the
West.
If you wish to understand the essence of post-modernism read
Michel Foucault,
a French historian and philosopher. He wrote: “The death of God does not
restore us to a limited and positivistic world, but to a world exposed by the
experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses
it.”
The West comes back to a starting point of the human being
existence: chaos, senselessness, boundless permissiveness. According to all
laws of dialectics, such system cannot exist for long time. Chaos requires
suppression, a ruthless supervisor, a despot who will cruelly return human
beings to their bounds. It will be fanatical Islam, and the Western elite is eagerly waiting for it. So the words of Archbishop of
Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams about the inevitability of Sharia
Law in Britain seem quite natural.
***
Shall we see a true conflict of civilizations? Maybe, yes.
Possibly, fast developing, dynamic India, and powerful China complete with
other Far East “dragons”, and Russia restoring its role of the “Third Rome” can
resist the arising Islamic Caliphate. Probably
also splinters of the Western Christian civilization will remain in Australia,
New Zealand, some countries in East Europe or Latin America. But for the West
it will be of no importance… [Don’t rule out some surprises God may have! S.D.]