Two cultures (WHY THE WEST IS SUPERIOR AND WILL WIN)

'THE dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance [and] Islamic intolerance." With that prediction, and with the phrase "Islam has bloody borders", Samuel P. Huntington's book The Clash of Civilisations (1996) has soared to cult status.

Huntington forecasts a bleak future. He divides humanity into seven civilisations (the West, Islam, Russian/Orthodox, Hindu/Indian, Chinese, Japanese and African) and he forecasts that they will fight each other indefinitely. To Huntington, these civilisations are super-tribes that, like primitive tribes, will attack each other until the end of time.

Only poverty restrains super-tribal aggression, believes Huntington, but he assumes that all seven civilisations will grow rich without losing the cultural differences that provoke super-tribal war. Huntington argues that there are many different types of capitalism and that each super-tribe will find the type that suits it.

The West is unique in its individualism and its rule of law, and the West invented capitalism. But because the West was individualistic and was ruled by law before it was rich, Huntington denies that those properties are important to the creation of wealth.

To prove his argument, Huntington pointed in 1996 to the "Tigers" of the Pacific Rim. Their cultures are collective and authoritarian, and they ignore the individual's rights under the law, yet they were growing so rich that, by 1996, they were beginning to ape the Muslims in their defiance of the West.

Yet where are the Tigers now? Japan is locked in economic stagnation, while Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia struggle with economic disaster. Only the West continues to grow.

Even in the West, people have championed more than one type of capitalism. Once, we were urged to admire Germany's Rhenish capitalism. Under Rhenish capitalism, competition and individual property rights are minimised. Instead, companies collude in cartels, their shares are owned by the banks that fund them and the nation is organised by the government as a corporate conspiracy.

Yet, contrary to myth, the German economy was, until recently, a relative failure. In 1830, Britain was 25 per cent richer than Germany per capita, and was still so in 1914 and in 1939. Germany was a threat because it was big in toto, but the Germans overtook us only when, after 1945, we forced them to adopt the liberal Anglo-American market model - at precisely the time that we, under Labour, abandoned it.

The great capitalist success has been the United States, which in 1830 was as poor as Germany but which, by 1890, had overtaken Britain per capita. American capitalism was fiercely laissez faire, being rooted in property rights, the rule of law and a ferocious individualism.

What so many writers ignore is that "catching up" is easy. A country, when poor, can enrich itself simply by copying its rich neighbours. Such catching up can be achieved by any regime - during the 1920s and 1930s even the Soviet Union grew swiftly.

But once a country has caught up, it can further enrich itself only by innovation, entrepreneurism and risk-taking. Those activities flourish only within an individualistic culture where property is secure under the law.

In his analysis, Huntington overlooked a simple historical principle: causes precede consequences. Western individualism and the rule of law preceded, and therefore did cause, its wealth. Successful capitalism, therefore, is rooted in Western values, and the powerful peoples of the future will be only those with whom we can do business.

The power of Islam is deceptive. It is not rich because it is dynamically capitalist, but because of the oil that the West discovered. The rage of the fundamentalist is born of having to choose between his culture and his prosperity.

To sum up, the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham is saying that you can choose to be an Islamic fundamentalist or you can choose to be civilised. You cannot choose both.

We are fighting to protect individualism. Let us not forget how our enemies call upon the individual to surrender themselves to "the will of Allah" (the mullahs really), which sounds suspciously like Hitler asking Germans to surrender their will and obey. These mullahs call upon youth to make the supreme sacrifice, while they themselves sit in reclusive comfort, growing ever more decrepit, whilst indulging the primal lusts they would have their followers deny. We need to obliterate these people. We need to make clean this situation. It will not do to anything less.

Regards, Ivan

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be." - Winston Churchill, 1940

This then, my lords and gentlemen, is the message which we send forth today to all states and nations, bound or free, to all the men in all the lands who care for freedom's cause. To our Allies and well-wishers in Europe, to our American friends and helpers drawing ever closer in their might across the ocean, this is the message-lift up your hearts, all will come right. Out of depths of sorrow and sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind. - Winston Churchill, 1941

"What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible that they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?" - Winston Churchill, 1941

LET US GO FORWARD TOGETHER - CLICK ABOVE!

There is a MAJOR flaw in Huntington's postion , which I haven't seen anyone mention. Africa will NOT fight the rest of the world. There are too many, and far too diverse countries , for AFRICA, as a whole to do that. How can Egypt be a part of a coalition with Zimbabwe and Nigeria ? Perhaps some SubSharan countries could possibly coaless; however , so many countries there are sliding into Stone Age tribalism, that the blood hatreds between tribes there, would preclude fighting the rest of the world.

I also think that he is wrong about Russia.

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