Yesterday, Jimmy J addressed some questions about the role of culture in our current difficulties in the Middle East. This is the underlying IED at the core of the ISG report. The anti-war left has taken the position that the Iraqis effectively are incapable, and in fact don't want, democracy. This is a derivative of Political Correctness. (If we cannot make judgments about other cultures, we certainly have no right to impose change upon them.)
One of the reasons I have referred to Political Correctness as a thought disorder is that if one adheres to the tenets of PC thought, one is constantly led into blind alleys of illogical cognitive dissonance. In my post on Applied Diplomatic Narcissism I made the point that "the hall mark of Narcissism is the failure of the Narcissist to fully grasp that another person's mind does not necessarily operate in precisely the way their (sic) mind operates." In response Lawnguylander left this comment:
How true but this applies to people looking for a way out of the Iraq mess rather than the people who got us there? How lame. Iraqi minds clearly do not operate like those found in western democracies but we were going to bring them the gift of democracy with our military might? Now that was narcissistic.
Another reader, RT, sent me an e-mail that said something very similar in more detailed and colorful language. He referenced The Battle of Omdurman-Sudan 1898:
At the battles end 10,000 Dervishes lay dead, 16,000 wounded, and 5,000 prisoners. The battle was over the British army saved, the army lost 48 men and 382 wounded.
Churchill, at least at the time, thought that the forces of civilization had prevailed. Lord Kitchener, the British commander, moved on to the Transvaal several years later to undertake more "civilizing" campaigns against the Boers. The Sudanese were ruled by Egyptian and British controlled strongmen for the next fifty years.
Do you really imagine that our current war in Iraq, with its ever changing rationales and unending carnage, will accomplish anything more than the British did in the Sudan 100 years ago? Good god! The reason history repeats itself is because human nature is so constant. If you believe that savagery resides in one religion or one culture, and that we in the "civilized" West are immune to its corrosive reality, you need to break out your Psychology 101 textbooks and study them. It's not 1939 again and George W. Bush isn't Winston Churchill.
More likely, it is 1898 and the useless slaughter of Sudanese Dervishes has been replaced by the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
In both examples, the emphasis is mine, and both deserve a response.
The PC derived implication here is that no one can ever make a judgment that one culture is better or superior to another. According to the PC rule book, the only absolute is "tolerance". Differences are meant to be celebrated and appreciated and never criticized. Western civilization, based on "dead white men" is, in fact, the only culture that can be criticized. This relates to the underlying idea that the white man has been the oppressor of people of color and has therefore, surrendered any claims to acting morally or ethically.
The logical conundrum for those who profess to believe in tolerance above all else is the near universal tolerance of intolerance that we see throughout Sharia infused societies. Elder of Ziyon reports on a survey of Palestinian Arab attitudes towards "honor killings" and how to preserve "family honor." Among Palestinian men, 25.3% strongly agree and 18.6% slightly agree with the statement that "the family has the right to murder the girl who committed an obscene act". The sentiment is shared by 15.4% of the women who strongly and 16.3% who slightly agree. Since one of the truly revolutionary successes of liberal democracy has been the liberation of women to become full fledged members of a free society and culture with all options available, such atavistic attitudes should raise alarm bells on the left.
This week yet another example of Palestinian savagery has illuminated what passes for debate in the Palestinian territories. A gunman, almost universally thought to be affiliated with Hamas, murdered three children of an al Fatah enemy. One is tempted to engage in schadenfreude for people who have long found it admirable to murder Jewish children, but civilized people everywhere can only watch in horror as these people, whose culture sanctions such behavior, turn their bloody swords on each other. Once having established that children are appropriate for sacrifice to one's bloody Gods, the identity of the children becomes subsumed by their utility to those desirous of blood. This is not restricted to the Palestinians who have used their children as weapons against Israel for many years. The savages in Iraq have also targeted children.
Throughout the Middle East, cultures that profess to be acting out of fidelity to their God, have taken the position that innocents are fair game for murder and mayhem. This seems to me to be the very depth of depravity. Surveys have continually shown that large minorities, sometimes majorities, of Muslim populations support the indiscriminate murder of Jews, Americans, Hindus, and Europeans. I defy the liberal PC proponents to explain how a culture that can produce such depravity should be accorded the respect that they demand.
At minimum a civilized culture should be expected to protect its most vulnerable members, usually women and children, against the predations of evil and violent men.
As for RT, if you are paying attention to the events in Iran, with daily threats of genocide against the hated Jews, you will be hard pressed to convince anyone that we are dealing with "Sudanese Dervishes". Persian Shia with nuclear weapons are a different order of magnitude than Dervishes armed with swords.
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