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To: dennisw
Kaplan is the guy who has a lot of brilliant ideas, but no judgement to enable him to decide which are true and which are clever but wrong. He's an enthusiastic source of clever new ideas, but as likely to be wildly wrong as right in the end.

This story is ominously reminiscent of last year's satirical article "Neo-cons Convert en Masse to Roman Paganism."

10 posted on 01/07/2002 3:36:17 PM PST by x
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To: x
And here I pegged you for the real-politik type. Guess not, eh?
12 posted on 01/07/2002 3:46:40 PM PST by dennisw
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To: x
Lord, how ludicrous.

I'm hesitant even to take the bait, because this book is so manifestly an attempt to gin up controversy and capitalize on neoconservative and neoliberal war fever. Yet somehow, I can't resist...

One might start by asking how, if the "pagan ethos" is such an irresistable military force, the most powerful and enduring pagan hegemony in the history of the world (yes, even more powerful than today's US) was, in fact, overtaken by humble Christians without an army. Then one might ask how Christian Byzantium managed to endure for another 1000 years against repeated assaults by larger and often more powerful enemies to her East, only to be fatally weakened by the then decidedly non-pagan forces of Western Europe.

Then of course there is the entire history of the world post-Byzantium, which was a nearly uninterrupted triumphal march of Christian forces around the entire Globe. At one point in the early 20th Century, Christian or nominally Christian forces controlled some 75% of the world's territory. The rest simply wasn't worth having.

Of coure the post-Christian (and arguably neo-pagan) era in the West has been another story altogether. Empires collapsing. Influence waning. Retrenchment on all fronts. Internecine conflicts against neo-pagan fascists in the European heartland. An abyssmal--in the truest sense of the word-- 60 years.

It seems to me that we need not reach quite so far back as paganism to reclaim the mantle of world leadership for the West.

14 posted on 01/07/2002 8:44:46 PM PST by cicero's_son
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