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To: Restorer

Wow. Islamo-cysts as the New Anti-Capitalist Warriors. The Left's softness on the issue makes a little more sense.


4 posted on 07/16/2005 3:37:55 PM PDT by timpad (The Wizard Tim - Keeper of the Holy Hand Grenade, Finder of Obscurata)
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To: timpad

The relevant point is that the left has never really been drawn to Communism or eco-freakism or anti-racism or anti-imperialism.

The important thing is that a great many people in the West despise their own culture and support all these other issues simply because they are anti-Western.


6 posted on 07/16/2005 3:42:26 PM PDT by Restorer (Liberalism: the auto-immune disease of societies.)
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To: timpad

Islamo-cysts as the New Anti-Capitalist Warriors

A very good book I ran across last year goes into this deeper.
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1594200084/ref=ase_immaculate-books/104-3711657-9431904?v=glance&s=books

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


It's a small densely packed book. Highly recomended.


17 posted on 07/19/2005 7:13:57 AM PDT by Valin (The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.)
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