Bolshevism in a Headdress

Welcome to FR.

War is violent.

That has been known for some time now. War is violent.

Christians also start wars.

It has to be said that this war started, so far as America was concerned, only after attempts on the lives of tens of thousands of Americans (which succeeded in killing three thousand). But it had been going on for many years on the other side, back at least to the earlier attempt to destroy the twin towers by destroying the foundation of one of them, with a view to causing it to crash into the other one.
Life isn't fair, and there will always be residual resentments on both sides after a conflict which people can rationalize as justifying their continuing to be implacable. But the bottom line is that America cannot accede to the terrorists and remain itself - we would have another civil war over religion before we would be able to install a moslem califate and Sharia law here.
So Bush is simply trying to do the least that has good prospect of transcending the problem. Faced as he was with the choice of war abroad or war here.

I've noticed the parallels and connections between militant islamism and marxism

"Occidentalism"
The West in the eyes of it's enemies
by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1594200084/ref=ase_immaculate-books/104-6285328-5697533?v=glance&s=books

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Four characterizations of the West contribute to the anti-Western stance Buruma and Margalit call Occidentalism and are used to justify attacking individual Westerners as less-than-human beings. The West prefers the sinful city to the virtuous countryside; the West destroys heroism and replaces it with trading; the West thinks only of matter and not of spirit; the West worships evil. Buruma and Margalit argue that the first two of those conceptions, typical of secular Occidentalism, are themselves Western, products of European romanticism that early-twentieth-century Japan and Germany exploited to their own ruin. The third idea informs Russia's long struggle with the West but stems from German romanticism, in particular, with its sense of the wounded national soul. The fourth, peculiar to religious Occidentalism, animates radical Islamism but derives from the good-evil polarities of Persian Manichaeism that the young Augustine embraced. Buruma and Margalit conclude that these ideas' lives are "a tale of cross-contamination" that cannot be ended by answering anti-Western intolerance with more intolerance. A timely tract, brilliantly though broadly argued. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description:
A pioneering investigation of the lineage of anti-Western stereotypes that traces them back to the West itself.

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others.

We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders-often Jews-pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.

A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.