Posted on 01/14/2019 7:21:14 PM PST by Jim Robinson
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Occidental culture, the Western world, Western society, and European civilization, is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe. The term also applies beyond Europe to countries and cultures whose histories are strongly connected to Europe by immigration, colonization, or influence. For example, Western culture includes countries in the Americas and Australasia, whose language and demographic ethnicity majorities are European. The development of western culture has been strongly influenced by Christianity.[3]
Western culture is characterized by a host of artistic, philosophic, literary and legal themes and traditions; the heritage of various European peoples. Christianity, including the Roman Catholic Church,[4][5][6] Protestantism[7][8] and the Orthodox Church,[9][10], has also played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization since at least the 4th century[11][12][13][14][15] as did Judaism (particularly Hellenistic Judaism and Jewish Christianity).[16][17][18][19] Before the Cold War era, the traditional Western viewpoint identified Western civilization with the Western Christian (Catholic-Protestant) countries and culture.[20][1]
A cornerstone of Western thought, beginning in ancient Greece and continuing through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, is the idea of rationalism in various spheres of life, especially religion, developed by Hellenistic philosophy, scholasticism and humanism. The Catholic Church was for centuries at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws and institutions which constitute Western civilization.[21][22] Empiricism later gave rise to the scientific method during the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.
Ancient Greece is considered the birthplace of many elements of Western culture, with the world's first democratic system of government and major advances in philosophy, science and mathematics. Greece was followed by Rome, which made key contributions in law, government, engineering and political organization.[23] Western culture continued to develop with the Christianisation of Europe during the Middle Ages and the reform and modernization triggered by the Renaissance. The Church preserved the intellectual developments of classical antiquity and is the reason many of them are still known today. Medieval Christianity created the modern university,[24][25] the hospital system,[26] scientific economics,[27][22] natural law (which would later influence the creation of international law)[28] and numerous other innovations across all intellectual fields. Christianity played a role in ending practices common among pagan societies, such as human sacrifice, slavery,[29] infanticide and polygamy.[30] The globalization by successive European colonial empires spread European ways of life and European educational methods around the world between the 16th and 20th centuries.[citation needed] European culture developed with a complex range of philosophy, medieval scholasticism and mysticism and Christian and secular humanism.[31][page needed] Rational thinking developed through a long age of change and formation, with the experiments of the Enlightenment and breakthroughs in the sciences. Tendencies that have come to define modern Western societies include the concept of political pluralism, individualism, prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements) and increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and human migration...
That's the thing though, that's how liberals operate... Separate everyone into little groups, make up random attacks on those little groups, ride in to save those little groups.
Only someday, maybe long in the future, maybe sooner than we think, the people in the little groups will realize that liberals are riding into save them because they think them incapable of actually defending themselves.
Truly, the idiot who says ‘I don't wanna have no East Indian driver’ is but a one dimensional creature and hardly much of a threat since they openly show their ignorance.
But the insidious rampant institutional racism of liberalism who has predetermined that entire cultures are never going to evolve enough to defend themselves - that is the true threat of racism, and one which is rampant throughout the Democrat party.
No, they had “special treatmen0t” and didn’t want it.
Sure, there were different groups, but the c0mmon support was for equality.
Culture is differentiable, and the protesters wanted ‘western’ culture.
May I add to those statues many others-— to demonstrate the true target is Western Civilization, and in particular US New World Civilization. To wit:
1.)In Pittsburgh, the home town of the great songwriter who was way ahead of his time and quite risque in the social commmentary dept... Stephen Foster. Recently Pittsburgh decided to take down a monument to the great Stephen Foster, because and quoting “there is an African American figure cast at his feet with agricultural implements, and wheat or sugarcane”— the so called black man has zero characteristics as such but is an elderly balding gentleman in overalls with a scythe in his hand.
2.) In Annapolis, MD outside the State House the supposed current Republican governor (and the legislature) decided to take down a statue to the legendary Jurist Roger B. Taney (who was famous for many SOUND decisions in his career), because of his deciding vote on the Dred Scott Decision. KID YOU NOT. It is GONE.
People who want to erase history are enabling the history to be re-peated because of the lack of education for our next generations to know what is going on. Incredibly foolish, and above all just as in Communist revolts— the “intellectual” and keepers of history are targeted first. So they can ride all over the people who built a Nation, with all of it’s flaws, and who corrected those flaws unlike ANY other in the world-— ever.
This stuff is an offshoot of a field called “Critical Theory”, among other things, part of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School of Social Research, outlined by Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and others. They were communists kicked out of Europe in the 1930s and came to America, Columbia university. We studied about the Frankfurt School at a state university 20 years ago. I was horrified. They’ve ramped it up to eleventy since that time.
It’s a system of deconstructing an existing society. If I remember right, it was Marcuse who came up with the “Make Love Not War” slogan in the 60s. Even then, the destabilizing efforts were well under way. Another piece of the puzzle around that time was written by a pair of university professors, Piven & Cloward. They suggested a method of overwhelming existing social welfare systems by flooding them with applicants to collapse them.
Over the insane actions of a clearly mentally ill brat teenager who thought it would be cool to kill blacks while sharing worship with them.
Whose narcissism led him to affiliate with a meme of the Battle Flag of the Army of N. VA. as some kind of talisman for hatred (as that is what was done with it by the 2nd Klan of the 1920s). And, from this “attachment” to this false meme— the generalization that this was “white supremacy” instead of the act of a clearly unbalanced lunatic (just like the Parkland, FL school killer)— political expedience for goals and agendas that the Left has found useful to their cause of division and destruction of our Civilization.
The television world has much to answer for, along with kneejerk social media. For they are indeed trying to control us... bit by bit.
All races and all cultures are not now and have never been "equal" no matter how much the damned left tries to convince us of that!
None of the Northern, Central, Southern American people had even discovered how to make and use the wheel, when Europeans first went there; ditto the vast majority of the people inhabiting the African continent! And as far as "culture", etc. goes...they were and still are found wanting!
The whole Rousseauian "NOBLE SAVAGE" garbage is SO wrong, that it's laughable!
And "RACISM" has always been embedded in all of mankind, though it has often been called something else and used different details towards the "other".
Thanks JimRob, sidebars:
So their idea of Utopia is run by a Pol Pot.
Ha. You’ll have better luck selling that schoolbook history to those too young to have lived through it.
I remember what SNCC and the black power groups in the Civil Rights Movement were saying because I listened to them. And by the end of the 60s they were driving it.
Without Western civilization there would not have been civilization on this planet.
The inexorable logic of the Nikki Haleys will lead to eradicating George Washington from the list of acceptable American heroes. He may be the last to go, but go he will.
Washington was the largest slave owner of his day. The majority of Presidents before Lincoln had owned slaves or were born into families that had owned them. They will all have to go.
And even Lincoln himself had said things that in 21st century America is anathema. He may have to go. Officially Acceptable American History will start with Obama.
The lack of education of these monument destroyers is immense. Read a while back that, in Illinois (Illinois!!) black lives matter and anti-fa took down a statue of Lincoln! Saying it was “a statue of some old wrinkled white dude”. Kid you not.
This is taking on the nature of the Chinese Red Guards, roaming in gangs and shaking their Little Red Books of Mao’s sayings. The Cultural Revolution that was.... regressive.
Going to watch “The Last Emperor of China” (a true story). What goes around comes around. In the South, we do not forget our Heritage, not in families who also fought in the Revolutionary War. Focused and determined resistance to thes e false tyrannical loonies— until my dying breath.
Are White Men Gods? (II): Getting the Facts Straight
https://fredoneverything.org/are-white-men-gods-ii-getting-the-facts-straight/
“In the South, we do not forget our Heritage, not in families who also fought in the Revolutionary War.”
Yep. I come from one of those families, even though I’m in the People’s Democratic Republic of California.
(A 14 minute video, first of two parts, and excellent)
Yep. Confederate historical monuments are the template. Certainly a case can be made they are objectionable, right? Where does it end, though?
Make no mistake, Washington, Lincoln, anybody and everybody. “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ Has Got To Go.” It’s just part of the plan. Thankfully, our politicians are rock-ribbed and will defend us to the end against the onslaught.
In June 2016, Trump stated: "Yet today, 240 years after the Revolution, we have turned things completely upside-down." - Donald Trump
And it's not just about jobs and economic opportunity. It's about freedom, exercise of "Creator-endowed rights and liberties," and opportunity for each citizen, not just self-appointed elitists who fancy themselves as entitled to make decisions for all.
Thomas Jefferson, only days before his death on July 4, 1826, explaining his inability to attend a gathering to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Declaration, wrote to Roger Weightman:
" I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. may it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view. the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."(Jefferson, June 24, 1826, to Roger Weightman, End of Jefferson quotation)Some time ago, I posted the following:
"Perhaps the so-called "progressive" enemies of freedom understand better than those who fancy themselves as "conservatives" that in order to reverse the Founders' ideas of "People over government," and institute "government over People," they must first marginalize and destroy the ideas from which liberty is derived.
The writings of America's Founders are replete with references which rebuke would-be tyrants and cite a Higher Source for life, liberty and rights. Early histories confirm those facts.
As so-called "progressives" have led a movement in forsaking the Founders' "reliance on Divine Providence," and belief that individuals are "endowed by their Creator," they also have forsaken the principles underlying America's Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and are systematically dismantling the greatest protections for liberty ever established for a people.
"Ideas have consequences"(Weaver).
The ideas of 1776 came out of a set of ideas consistent with liberty.
We tend to forget, or have never considered, that other world views existed then, as now.
Unless today's citizens rediscover the ideas of liberty existing in what Jefferson called "the American mind" of 1776, we risk going back to the "Old World" ideas which preceded the "Miracle of America."
There are those who call themselves "progressives," when, in fact, their ideas are regressive and enslaving, and as old as the history of civilization.
Would suggest to any who wish an authentic history of the ideas underlying American's founding a visit to this web site, at which Richard Frothingham's outstanding 1872 "History of the Rise of the Republic of the United States" can be read on line.
This 600+-page history traces the ideas which gave birth to the American founding. Throughout, Richard Frothingham, the historian, develops the idea that it is "the Christian idea of man" which allowed the philosophy underlying the Declaration of Independence and Constitution to become a reality--an idea which recognizes the individual and the Source of his/her "Creator"-endowed life, liberty and law.
Is there any wonder that the enemies of freedom, the so-called "progressives," do not promote such authentic histories of America? Their philosophy puts something called "the state," or "global interests" as being superior to individuals and requires a political elitist group to decide what role individuals are to play.
In other words, they must turn the Founders' ideas upside-down in order to achieve a common mediocrity for individuals and power for themselves.
The Visigoths are inside the gates.
Western Civilization and Biblical Christianity are the twin pillars of personal liberty.
The Marxists and Muslims are united globally in their lust to destroy both.
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