Sultan Knish/Daniel Greenfield Ping List (notification of new articles). FReepmail or drop me a comment to get on or off.
Posted on 09/14/2012 2:42:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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The perils of designer tribalism "............Whatever the current object of adulation— the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America —the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.
It is all part of what Bruckner calls “the enchanting music of departure.” Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world—its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition—are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. “Ignoring the real human race entirely,” Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, “I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world.” The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts “were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history."....................
oikophobia— hatred for the familiar
Fantastic piece and very insightful. Basically a case study in liberalism. All the best intentions (looked at in one way) with disastrous results (no matter how you look at it).
Suicide by Appeasement!
Sterling post, CW. Send it to Romney. Maybe it will keep his advisors awake to reality.
Thanks.
Huge bump on this this one, and a few pings.
I should have pinged you to this as well. You should ping the list.
NO, Mr. Daniel Greenfield , not our vision, their vision (the liberal "world savers" you mention), or even more narrowly his vision.
You're wrong in so many ways in making such a broad statement and I vehemently deny, and resent the implication, that I have any "blind spot" in my vision.
You can stow that pap!
Thanks for posting this excellent perspective. Now I understand the “thinking” behind oblunder’s expeditions in the middle east. Sad that our citizens are being sucked into his vision, moths to a fire. Hillary is especially blind and evil in this.
Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony "Even now, the outrageous Clintonian shenanigans continue. We've just learned that Huma, her unemployed husband Anthony, and their baby Jordan are moving into a $3.3-million Park Avenue apartment owned by a longtime Clinton crony and top Obama bundler [Jack Rosen]. You and I may have to live within our means, but in Clinton World, such rules never seem to apply.
Now as Bill formally nominates Obama for a second term, both men are complicit in Hillary's scandal that should be the shame of the nation. But what's an historic disgrace to us is less than a shrug to them. Bill has been taking Saudi money by the barrel for years, and Obama admires the Muslim Brotherhood.
In fact, working with Hillary's State Department, Obama has helped to install the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, using the "Arab Spring" turmoil to empower these sworn America-haters.
And now here comes the icing on the treachery cake: Obama and Hillary reportedly have informed Iran that they've abandoned Israel, leaving the only Jewish State to face a nuclear Iran alone. How proud the Abedin family must be of their little girl!....."
“...Stevens may have studied Islam, he had learned very little about it, and so his final lesson was the bloody one that Westerners who never really learn what Islam is about end up receiving.”
Libs rarely learn.
Why?
Because their narcissistic need to think highly of themselves...you know, “above it all” TRUMPS reality.
And just like narcissists, they destroy everything they touch.
Good article! Great find!
Will do, thanks.
Personally, I think it’s a little too soon to be speaking ill of the dead - Monday would have been a better decision.
On another note, I’d like to see the Wikileaks cables he referenced.
It’s nice to hear the grown up perspective, Thank you CW.
We are at war. There is no time to delay a realistic hard-eyed assessment of how we got to Benghazi.
Agree on the cables.
very well written piece. thank you for sharing it
“We are at war. There is no time to delay a realistic hard-eyed assessment of how we got to Benghazi.”
Really? Waiting until Monday to write an article like this is going to hurt the “war effort”?
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