This came in an email and only barely escaped being thrown in the spam box. Luckily, I took a few seconds to start reading and lo and behold... it's a must-read. From "outside the box," if you will.
According to the email, the author is Alexander Maistrovoy, "a journalist with the Russian-language Israeli newspaper, Novosty Nedely."
Can a tango of a murderer and a suicide be considered “the Clash of Civilizations"?
A pinnacle of self-destruction
It is difficult to say the clash of which civilizations Samuel Huntington meant. 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 conquerer 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 judgements of Tom Hayden differ from those of Mukdata al Sadr? Is Noam Chomsky or Susan Sontag different in their statements on the USA fr! om 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 reflexion 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, nobili! ty 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? They are none. There is no need to expropriate anybody because, contrary to the Russian marginals-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 hundred-per-cent Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards who according to the logic of things have no reasons 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? May be, 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…
Comments