Posted on 05/19/2004 2:54:18 AM PDT by Theodore R.
What do we offer the world?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: May 19, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
"So, how do we advance the cause of female emancipation in the Muslim world?" asks Richard Perle in "An End to Evil." He replies, "We need to remind the women of Islam ceaselessly: Our enemies are the same as theirs; our victory will be theirs as well."
Well, the neoconservative cause "of female emancipation in the Muslim world" was probably set back a bit by the photo shoot of Pfc. Lynndie England and the "Girls Gone Wild" of Abu Ghraib prison.
Indeed, the filmed orgies among U.S. military police outside the cells of Iraqi prisoners, the S&M humiliation of Muslim men, the sexual torment of their women raise a question. Exactly what are the "values" the West has to teach the Islamic world?
"This war ... is about – deeply about – sex," declaims neocon Charles Krauthammer. Militant Islam is "threatened by the West because of our twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation."
But whose "twin doctrines" is Krauthammer talking about? The sexual liberation he calls our doctrine belongs to a '60s revolution that devout Christians, Jews and Muslims have been resisting for years.
What does Krauthammer mean by sexual liberation? The right of "tweeners" and teenage girls to dress and behave like Britney Spears? Their right to condoms in junior high? Their right to abortion without parental consent?
If conservatives reject the "equality" preached by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, NARAL and the National Organization for Women, why seek to impose it on the Islamic world? Why not stand beside Islam, and against Hollywood and Hillary?
In June 2002 at West Point, President Bush said, "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time and in every place."
But even John Kerry does not agree with George Bush on the morality of homosexual unions and stem-cell research. On such issues, conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats.
The president notwithstanding, Americans no longer agree on what is moral truth. For as someone said a few years back, there is a cultural war going on in this country – a religious war. It is about who we are, what we believe and what we stand for as a people.
What some of us view as the moral descent of a great and Godly republic into imperial decadence, neocons see as their big chance to rule the world.
In Georgia, recently, the president declared to great applause: "I can't tell you how proud I am of our commitment to values. ... That commitment to values is going to be an integral part of our foreign policy as we move forward. These aren't American values, these are universal values. Values that speak universal truths."
But what universal values is he talking about? If he intends to impose the values of MTV America on the Muslim world in the name of a "world democratic revolution," he will provoke and incite a war of civilizations America cannot win because Americans do not want to fight it. This may be the neocons' war. It is not our war.
When Bush speaks of freedom as God's gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish "The Satanic Verses" – a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong?
When the president speaks of freedom, does he mean the First Amendment prohibition against our children reading the Bible and being taught the Ten Commandments in school?
If the president wishes to fight a moral crusade, he should know the enemy is inside the gates. The great moral and cultural threats to our civilization come not from outside America, but from within. We have met the enemy, and he is us. The war for the soul of America is not going to be lost or won in Fallujah.
Unfortunately, Pagan America of 2004 has far less to offer the world in cultural fare than did Christian America of 1954. Many of the movies, books, magazines, TV shows, videos and much of the music we export to the world are as poisonous as the narcotics the Royal Navy forced on the Chinese people in the Opium Wars.
A society that accepts the killing of a third of its babies as women's "emancipation," that considers homosexual marriage to be social progress, that hands out contraceptives to 13-year-old girls at junior high ought to be seeking out a confessional – better yet, an exorcist – rather than striding into a pulpit like Elmer Gantry to lecture mankind on the superiority of "American values."
Islam per se, doesn't have a position on "beheading" infidels.
There are also plenty of Islamics that have not beheaded any infidels... some Islamic nations don't do it at all anymore... so tis not a specifically islamic function. Some leaders have come out and said this is "against Islam."
Besides, other cultures have done it, the french, the english and other European nations... so don't pin that ugly beheading last week on the religions of peacers so directly... /s
Your defense of the religion of peacers who regularly mutilate women as part of the process of "keeping them morally pure" is weak. Sell it to somebody else.
"Some of us remember a better country than the one we have today, one where you could turn on the TV or go to the movies or listen to the radio without encountering incessant violence, sex, and profanity. And we'd like that country back."
Pat remembers that country too, and I think the insanity of our current situation has perhaps driven Pat a little mad.
Personally, I gave up on "fighting the good fight" when the patriot group I was involved in couldn't grow larger than 8-10 men.
Most of the other "Christian Patriots" were too busy watching Monday Night Football or chasing their particular fetish to get involved in REALLY working to restore our Republic back to the blessings of Goad Almighty.
Even though we had a weekly meeting at one of the largest super-churches in the nation, the most support we could could garner was a "good job guys" or pat on the back.
There are not enough GOOD MEN left in the country to even get a councilman elected on the local level.
I agree, in part. The raw capacity to act immorally can be traced to the Fall. But social morality waxes and wanes. The points that I'm trying to make are twofold. First, social morality isn't just waning, it's collapsing. Secondly, bus BJs haven't arisen because of a lack of discipline on the bus, but because children raised in an amoral environment (school/media/arts) have accepted the idea that bus BJs are normative, or at least within the pale. Even back in the Zep/Alice Cooper/Black Sabbath years, this kind of thing was unimaginable.
No, but sexual morality is surely a part of morality. And I can think of no greater evil in America today than legalized abortion, a practice that came about to safeguard the sexual "liberation" Krauthammer wants to bring to the Islamic world. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Krauthammer, unlike Buchanan, favors legalized abortion.
>>>>>After all, before television, movies, and radio, there was not extra-marital sex in America, right?<<<<<<
Of course there has always been sin. But there is a crucial difference between a society that regards sin as normative and one that regards it as, well, sin. When Christian values were in the ascendancy in the West, fornication was less prevalent that it is today.
Of course, we have the luxury of debating such things under an American flag, and not a British one, precisely because the French in 1775 didn't see things quite that way. It served their interests to assist the American rebels, just as it serves our interests to pacify the Middle East - no holy crusade required, merely an enlightened understanding of one's own self-interest.
You can care about the unfortunate, but you have to care more about bigger things-- prioritize-- (in his case, he meant about himself)-- the soundness of spending blood and treasure for a mission unlikely to succeed (and probably one that will make things worse).
I keep hearing that, but it's a completely ahistorical point of view. The few examples of real nation building we have, postwar Germany and Japan, turned out rather well, I think. Not only does Pat not have simple decency on his side, he doesn't really have history on his side either, contrary to what he would have you believe.
After we just killed 40 Iraqis at a wedding party:
I see - when Pat is comparing Saddam to his fears of an Iranian style radical theocracy, we should stop and engage in a sober cost-benefit analysis, and thus settle on the status quo of sticking with the monster we know. But when we go in there, suddenly that cost-benefit analysis goes right out the window - even one single drop of innocent blood is too much to bear, and the potential benefits are ruled illusory. Can we say "double standard"?
You are right, and the most outrageous aspect of the wacko Perle/Frum doctrine, is that it completely rejects the whole moral basis for relations between nations. Let me start with the man whom the Founding Fathers considered the foremost authority on the Law of Nations, Vattel:
A nation then is mistress of her own actions so long as they do not affect the proper and perfect rights of any other nation--so long as she is only internally bound, and does not lie under any external and perfect obligation. If she makes an ill use or her liberty, she is guilty of a breach of duty; but other nations are bound to acquiesce in her conduct, since they have no right to dictate to her.
Since nations are free, independent, and equal, and since each possesses the right of judging, according to the dictates of her conscience, what conduct she is to pursue in order to fulfil her duties; the effect of the whole is, to produce, at least externally and in the eyes of mankind, a perfect equality of rights between nations, in the administration of their affairs and the pursuit of their pretensions, without regard to the intrinsic justice of their conduct, of which others have no right to form a definitive judgment;....
When the silly poseurs, like Frum, talk about imposing morality on others, they show how completely they fail to understand morality, as a quality. (Oh, and yes, I take George Washington as an authority over Canadian pseudo-intellectual Yale boys. And Washington understood that morals were what directed the individual, not something a collective imposed upon other peoples in distant lands.)
Of course, the Feminist Agenda, that Perle endorsed in the Buchanan quote, is the furthest thing on God's green earth, from moral values.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Never said she was. A strong supporter though, a pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, pro welfare, pro "living wage" (pat is too) marxist whose support was coveted by Pat. I've not doubt she would have served in a PJB administration. Yes, whe left, she wouldn't compromise her values. At least she was committed. Pat had no problem compromising his, after all, the nomination was as stake. Your boy's pure opportunist. I wouldn't believe a thing he says. As a journalist that's fine, as a political candidate, he'd do better to leave the Christian values stuff home. If they'd vote for him, he'd likely welcome Planned Parenthood and the Rainbow coalition.
Comparing two imperfect outcomes against a single moral standard, and choosing the lesser evil, is not moral relativism.
Good point.
The Soviets gave us a chance to help defeat Hitler in Europe..We also had a war to fight in the Pacific,...or don't you recall?
Iraq is not a nation but an administrative unit. It is comprised of several distinct nations. Our efforts to merge them into one nation are no more an example of the moral high ground than were Saddam's efforts in the same direction.
The Germans, on the other hand, are a group of kindred nations. Again, we did not make them into a nation, we changed the laws under which they were governed back to something not that different from what had been their legal systems, up until 12 1/2 years earlier. That is hardly a precedent for the wacko theories, recently being floated for post conquest Iraq. (See, also, Iraq--Tactical Folly, Strategic Madness.)
William Flax
Maybe because they secretly enjoy the decadence. They pay lip service to the "moral values" only to get votes, money and support from the "simpletons". In real life they are one social group with the left wing libertines.
And you pay lip service to being a conservative.
LOL. If that's what you want to call the whole Second World War - "obtaining their cooperation". A closed, militaristic, autocratic monarchy, built on a belief in the emperor as the divine made corporeal, becomes an open, pacifistic, and democratic society. None of those cultural, social, or political aspects - openness, pacifism, democracy - ever existed at any time during the two-and-a-half millennia prior to 1945, but all we did was "obtain their cooperation" to introduce a few minor reforms.
Sure. Whatever. I understand that downplaying historical fact is rather necessary for Pat, but really now - while you're at it, if you pull my other leg it'll play a little tune for you.
I will reveal you my secret - I do not watch TV. I found a way to turn off the telescreen. This is what makes me different, just do not tell on me.
A little Google search would update your Goebbel's stuff. Fulani was dumped by Buchanan who refused her Reform party takeover attempt.
Tuesday, June 20, 2000 Fulani exits Buchanan campaign The Associated Press
"Fulani, who will remain in the Reform Party, also complained that Buchanan and his sister and campaign manager, Bay Buchanan, refused to support her bid to become the national chairwoman of the party. ``I do believe the deepest problems in our society are not economic or political, but moral,'' Buchanan wrote. "
The real question is which is larger? Micheal Moore's arse of pat buchanan's fat head?
Call me a paleo-conservative, or social conservative if you wish.
So you admit that Pat Buchanan has a big head, don't you?
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