Poetry with a message
Bookworm on Oct 02 2006 at 8:18 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
Victor Davis Hanson, in a must-read article, rises to poetic heights as he surveys civilization’s end:
But now all that hard-won effort [toward Enlightenment] of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation.
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Just think: Put on an opera in today’s Germany, and have it shut down, not by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.
Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats — in the heart of Europe no less.
Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in “liberal” Holland.
Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into hiding.
Quote an ancient treatise, as did the pope, and learn your entire Church may come under assault, and the magnificent stones of the Vatican offer no refuge.
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Phenomenal link. Beautifully written.
In the end, after so many words written by so many on this. Simply, what we see, is fear.
Fear.
We will cite every reason, however non – plausible, as to why we feel the way that we do. Rather than admit, simply, that we are afraid.
Fear.
It is not easy to face, no matter who you are. And that is exactly why it is so important that it must be faced.
And yet, to do this, in the end, you must believe in something. Something real. Realer than anything else. Something, that you live for.
Such faith can only be known in the absence of egotism.
In recognizing this. Is it any surprise then, that it is those of the left, that so readily fall to their knees, before those who would take from them all liberty. Snarling as they do so, at any who choose instead to stand. A stand which before their own eyes, must be mocked and rendered invalid at all cost. Lest that courage, that faith, serve as a mirror, by which they see the wretch, that deep down, they know themselves to be.
BW, I love your blog. But darlin, one thing that’s never gelled with me, is how someone, who knows within her, such clear truths, is married to someone, who does not feel those same deep truths within himself. It just doesn’t make sense.
More likely he is nothing of the sort, and you just portray him as such, to have a useful counterpoint to better explain your own position. But it doesn’t work.
But hey, I’m not omniscient. I may be completely wrong about this.
If that is the case, well then, I’ll just have to file it along with all the other totally inexplicable stuff out there. Take the popularity of Big Brother, as only one example.
I have always wondered. Why don’t a lot of people on the Left read VDH, or just anything in general about war strategy and history?
Sure, there’s Huffington, but she’s not on the same level as VDH, and you can see that when they debate.
BW, I love your blog. But darlin, one thing that’s never gelled with me, is how someone, who knows within her, such clear truths, is married to someone, who does not feel those same deep truths within himself. It just doesn’t make sense.
A lot of things don’t make sense, that is human existence. Heisenberg’s Principle still applies, even to humanity.
For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.
Power commands respect, in proportion to how much of your life is under that power. This is almost a law of human behavior, assuming human behavior has any laws.
Second, almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis. Somehow Europeans have ever-so-insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better
If you believe that there is nothing worth dieing for, nothing worth killing for, then you will have little willpower and spirituality to devote to such useless pursuits as freedom of expression.
So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.
Righteous paladins, defenders of the right, whom we should bow to as they lead the way to the Path of Righteousness that all of humanity shall follow.
Who is going to follow Europe to its fated destination? Do we have a volunteer for the road to Heaven?
Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing.
As Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle stated, you cannot know everything at every time. Attempting to do so, scrambles whatever knowledge you might have of the moment.
And it was the heralded EU that sought “soft” power rather than the Neanderthal resort to arms.
hey! the Neanderthals were budding liberals, they took care of their crippled, which was not true of Cro-Magnon man.
That it was logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists.
Anyone who ever connected the dots concerning Socialism’s rise and Nazism would understand what that was about years ago. You can’t get something like Nazism without Socialism and Revolutionary disruptions. Because it takes a revolution to so change the principles of a country, to something so extreme, that the extreme elitists become ultra-conservatives in attempting to hold onto their power and status. Socialism paves the way for the more ruthless and more vital totalitarian state, in one way or another. People on the Left have argued that Democratic Socialism is the perfect “hybrid”. How little do they really know of what makes a STRONG hybrid?
We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.
Does he mean that Europe’s path is not the path to salvation and Heavenly rewards? Who da dunk?