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| Inside the Movement | Turtles All The Way Down |
It's Because We are Taking Over the World
by Christopher Chantrill
August 08, 2005 at 9:26 am
WHAT COULD we do, the war critics ask, to deal with Al Qaeda’s demands so that they will go away and leave us alone? What have we done to stir them up to such rage?
The thesis of the “Why do they hate us” crowd gets a good airing from the BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner.
Gardner walks through the usual routine. The terror masters do not exactly tell us what they want.
But they have, through smuggled video cassettes and internet broadcasts, and in their own pedantic and lecturing way, made their demands clear. These are: the withdrawal of all Western forces from Muslim lands, especially Iraq, the withdrawal of support for Israel, and of support for "apostate" governments, specifically in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Of course, he admits, Al Qaeda’s grand plan is a single caliphate from the Philippines to Gibraltar, but by meeting their demands on Iraq we could damp down the enthusiasm in the Muslim street. And then the terrorists would probably go away.
But this approach, treating the West as just there and the terrorists as angry victims enraged by oppression misses the point.
The West is a world-historical movement that wants to take over the whole world and convert it to democracy and capitalism. You can personalize this if you like in the person of George W. Bush, but that would miss the point. The leader of the United States plays the role of the leader of the world-historical western movement whatever his party or his name. The radical Muslims rightly understand that if things keep going the way they are then their culture and way of life will be destroyed. The US invasion of Iraq and military presence in the Arab lands is merely a local manifestation of the world-historical force of western capitalism and democracy at work. The US deploys its armed forces in Iraq and the Arab lands because they are resisting our world-historical force.
This conflict is not going to be resolved by dialog and diplomacy. It is a clash between two world-historical forces. One of them will win, and the other will be destroyed.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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