Buchanan Asks, "What Do We Offer the World?"

WND.com ^ | 05-19-04 | Buchanan, Patrick J.

[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."

[Ohioan]

Buchanan was making some rhetorical points around the theme of taking exception to the really outrageous Perle quote, with which he started.

But the President is guilty of a gross overreach, in his moral pontifications. The correct view of moral judgments among different nations--correct from the standpoint of general acceptance among Western Statesmen, as a working hypothesis--was stated by Vattel, two hundred years ago:

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;....

For my personal thoughts on our post conquest policy in Iraq, see Iraq.

The thrust of Pat's argument goes to the absurdity of Perle's suggestion that we dictate the morality of sexual conduct, not to any of the manifold side-issues that Pat's detractors have sought to inject.

William Flax

[CWOJackson]

"There are many facts not mentioned in the law."

If it's not in the Constitution it's not a fact.

[ninenot]

Well, take your own damn advice and DON'T READ HIM. You know, get off the thread.

[CWOJackson]

Feel free to leave. This is a buchanan thread, not place of worship.

[ninenot]

AP, ChiefWarrantOfficer does not want to be bothered with facts. Please do not ping him with facts. Please do not reply to his posts with facts.

[CWOJackson]

Your problem IS the facts. The facts that your hero is a pathetic, bitter shell of a man.

[ex-snook]

"Show me the posters who hate Pat because he likes Jews. "

Pat likes Jesus who was born of Mary a Jewish mother. Gibson took his lumps for the same reason.

[CWOJackson]

LOL! Trying to compare Gibson and buchanan? What a reach.

[Bella_Bru]

America is a Christian country and to be precise a Protestant country. Sorry.

That doesn't mean we all have to live like Protestants. Go ahead and try to force people. I am sure those that hold the 2nd Amendment dear will make sure it is not successful.

[Howlin]

Jewish schools are among the finest.

Absolutely!! I'm all for them getting money, too!

[Luis Gonzalez]

"If you doubt our values have changed, just compare the sexual morality portrayed in the movies of the '30s, '40s, and '50s and the garbage spewed forth by Hollywood today, where fornication and even adultery are portrayed as the norm."

A reader's review:

Reading this book probably wasn't the best way to learn of Hollywood's sordid trash, when I bought this ages ago, but I didn't have a movie encyclopedia at the time, which would have been useful, and I would've learned of the many tragedies that befell certain Hollywood stars in a more scholarly way. However, I didn't know that Peg Enwistle was the one who started a trend by diving off the LAND of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, which now reads HOLLYWOOD.

The key scandals of the 1920's through 1950's are played out. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921, involving his alleged part in the death of starlet Virginia Rappe, was the O.J. Simpson of the 1920's is given a separate chapter. It took three trials to acquit him, but his career was finished. As Anger snidily writes, "The Prince of Whales had been harpooned." The others include Errol Flynn being accused of having sex with two underage girls, Mary Astor's diary, and the stabbing death of Lana Turner's lover John Stompanato by Cheryl Crane. Frances Farmer's nervous breakdown and collapse has some of snidiness in there, although he makes it clear that he does sympathize with her plight years before Nirvana did a song on her on their In Utero album.

Two mysterious and to this day still unsolved are probed, that of Thelma Todd, the Ice Cream Blonde, who may have been murdered by the mob instead of committing suicide, and the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, and those aren't as treated sensationally as other material.

Suicides are written with some embellishment in this book, i.e. Paul Bern, Jean Harlow's second husband, Marie Prevost, whose starving dog ate parts of her body, Lupe Velez, a.k.a. the Mexican Spitfire, and Carole Landis. Separate sections are written for Velez and Landis.

However, not all events and people get Angers' chops and slices. The Red Scare that ruined the lives of actors such as Gale Sondergaard and John Garfield, and the Hollywood Ten is presented as the travesty it was: "What it did do was ruin many lives and careers and tarnish the glamor of Tinsel Town." And the blackmailing practices of the snoopy, Confidential magazine, forcing performers to cough up to prevent them from revealing sordid things about performers. Thankfully, this terror was stopped when the founder of the magazine committed suicide after being named as a communist by Joe McCarthy. He's also contemptuous of the two gossip columnist Gorgons, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

Towards the end, the decline of Hollywood in the 1960's is portrayed as one sordid death after another, ranging from La Monroe, Judy Garland, Ramon Novarro, and George Sanders. Somehow, I did not need to know that Garland died sitting on the toilet in her London flat.

Not a scholarly history of Hollywood's seamy side by any means. Rather, Kenneth Anger drags out Hollywood's dirty laundry and lays it out in a shamelessly sensationalistic and exploitational format, with catty sentences to boot, even including a few nude photos of starlets. Find a film encyclopedia instead. After reading this, I shudder to think what the movie was like.

[Howlin]

Dittos!

[Bella_Bru]

Pat likes Jesus who was born of Mary a Jewish mother. Gibson took his lumps for the same reason.

And because they both wish to follow in Jesus's footsteps, they both live like Jews, right?

[tpaine]

The claim by "cultural conservatives" that morals are somehow universal is beyond being just plain wrong,...

Some moral values are consistent among cultures, such as not committing murder, theft, assault, or fraud. They can better be described as "ethics".


"Moral" considerations involving eating, drinking, smoking, entertainment, attire, consensual sex, etc. vary from culture to culture.

In a free nation, it's best for government to butt out of those.
-Eric

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Aquinasfan wrote:
This looks like a contradiction to me.
All you've done is called "morals," "ethics." In reality, there is no difference.

______________________________________


You ignored his explanation of his view on ethics vs morals.
-- Hardly an ethical way to make a rebuttal, is it?
258 tpaine

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Certainly not an immoral method.

Erocc does not share the concept of morality which was prevalent in this country in 1954.

He's part of the problem PJB discusses.
329 9not

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I was 18 in '54, and considered the prevailing 'morality' highly hypocritical.

Many of the "moral laws" involving drinking, smoking, entertainment, attire, consensual sex, etc, were roundly ignored by most anyone that had a choice.

You're remembering a moral america that never existed.

[ninenot]

No stretch at all, but it takes a bit of thinking to understand the connection.

[CWOJackson]

I always love how these so-called conservatives can ignore the Constitution so easily.

[CWOJackson]

No, it takes a lot of misunderstanding to even attempt to compare someone such as Gibson with buchanan.

[CWOJackson]

Remember when buchanan actually had supporters? He's fallen a long ways.

[ninenot]

AquinasFan looked up the words "morals" and "ethics."

It would benefit you to do the same.

[Thorin]

Huh? The relevant comparison is between the movies produced by Hollywood during its Golden Age and the garbage spewed forth today. I doubt most actors were more moral then than today. But they wanted to keep their immoral antics out of the papers. And they didn't glorify immorality on the big screen.