Posted on 05/12/2017 12:25:18 PM PDT by Twotone
The Danish cartoon controversy prompted a spectacular failure of will and principle in the West, the commentator tells Quadrant. 'First they come for the cartoonists, ultimately they move on to everybody else. The provocations ... get lamer and lamer. We are losing our world.'
I’m cruising down New England country lanes that criss-cross towns that look like Norman Rockwell theme parks—on my way to find Mark Steyn—but I’m not allowed to tell you exactly where I am.
My destination is the equivalent of a military bunker—a hidden television studio where, later today, they’ll be installing the concert grand piano Steyn will be using when he launches his variety talk show. Even though I’m less than an hour from the Canadian border and ninety minutes from Montreal, and even though the last battle fought here was in 1777 (the Green Mountain Boys routed some Brits, Hessians and Iroquois under German command), tactical secrecy is the order of the day.
Mark Steyn is under a fatwa.
(Excerpt) Read more at quadrant.org.au ...
Bump for later.
Bumpity-bump
As a retired military chaplain, I've spent time thinking about the need for warriors. In liberal circles, it's not polite to discuss all the warriors in the bible, at least not the warfaring part of their lives, but we would be changing the book irrevocably if we took the nature of the warriors out of the bible.
The question in my mind is about when the Judeo-Christian world has been empowered to fight back and when they have not.
I'm still puzzled by how quickly and completely a movement like Islam, while still growing, overpowered the Christian world of the Mediterranean middle east in such a short period of time. What about their religion didn't fit the other eras when believer-warriors fought back?
What was different about those other times when Christians arose and fought. The article mentions the tough Balkans, but what about Tours, Vienna, Vlad the Impaler...the Crusades
Were they just brutes, or did their brand of Christianity lend itself to protecting Christianity while a different brand of it was remembered best for having disappeared? I assume they just died.
I've always been impressed with Cornelius, centurion in the Book of Acts. God chose Cornelius to be the first, unarguably 100% gentile to receive the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ. What's important was that a centurion was pure warrior. They weren't soft. They earned their position by being the baddest of the bad.
Peter was not given the message: “Tell Cornelius to give up the evil military, and I'll be clear to accept Gentiles into Christianity.”
Nope, the message was not to call anything unclean that God had declared just fine.
A warrior was just fine.
I read the entire article, OUTSTANDING. I seriously doubt many will take the time. It takes longer than 30 seconds.
Excellent article. Steyn is my favorite commentator. He is one of the very best anywhere.
A friend sent an interesting commentary about Trump, saying that he does not accept GUILT, the guilt that leftists have inflicted on us for many years now. I think that is essentially the issue. We have allowed these lying leftists to make us feel guilty & consequently we cannot fight back. Mark Steyn makes that case in the article. We should not feel guilty about Western Civilization. Yes, bad things have been done, but on the whole we’ve moved forward towards righteousness & human freedom. Here’s the article that was sent:
No Non-Minority guilt, no American guilt, no Conservative guilt, no Male guilt. How Trump Stole the Left’s Main Weapon!
A PROJECT OF THE DAVID HOROWITZ FREEDOM CENTER
M.J. Randolph 05-11-2017
For decades, conservatives, Republicans and non-Leftist Independents have been told that just by merely existing, you’re wrong. You’ve been told by the Left to “check your ‘privilege,’” so they have. They’ve been told that their American exceptionalism is vulgar, that it is rude to other countries, so they’ve tempered it. They’ve been told that everything they’ve been brought up to believe and cherish, regardless of their race, color or creed, is somehow vile, racist, patriarchal, and bigoted, so they’ve paused and evaluated their beliefs. Then along comes Donald Trump who absolutely obliterated the way the Left has always made the Right feel.
Emory University is a decidedly left-leaning university and this is an excellent article by Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein at American Greatness discussing how Trump stole the Left’s main weapon:
In the last 70 years of culture wars in America, there has been no stronger weapon than guilt. It is, and always has been, the Left’s great hammer of progress. It figured powerfully in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, in women’s liberation, and same-sex marriage.
Guilt runs like napalm through the teaching of U.S. history from 5th grade through college. It stains all controversies over affirmative action, transgender bathrooms, and the glass ceiling. The entire careers of tens of thousands of Leftist commentators from the self-righteous Bill Moyers to the self-regarding Ta-Nehisi Coates rest solely upon nothing but dispensing guilt.
If we add up the successes guilt has brought to hard-left progressive causes and identity politics, we realize just how important guilt is to the Left agenda.
Without it, in fact, the Left fails, it has no heart or soul.
So how did Trump destroy their massive and all-inclusive guilt-inducing power?
By refusing to accept it; simple.
He has no white guilt. He doesn’t feel any male guilt, either, or American guilt or Christian guilt. He talks about the United States with uncritical approval—“America First”—and that’s a true “thought crime” in the eyes of liberals. It ignores slavery, Jim Crow, the Indian wars, Manzanar … Donald Trump would never ever refer to America, and all other present and past nations, as beset by the original sin of racism, as Barack Obama did non-stop, and that makes him worse than a conservative. President Trump is a bigot.
He openly enjoys the company of legions of attractive women and makes no apologies for it. A man of proper male guilt would have bowed out after the bus tapes were released during the campaign, but there he was in the second presidential debate talking about jail time for Hillary.
And he wouldn’t say, he would not say, “Black Lives Matter,” either, a slogan that strongly implies whites, Hispanics and Asians don’t care about black lives, but insisted, “All lives matter.”
Finally, while Christians, especially Catholics and Evangelicals, are supposed to feel guilty, are practically required to feel guilty, for their doctrine on gender roles and abortion, President Trump quickly dropped gender identity from Title IX and nominated a religious conservative to the Supreme Court.
Bauerlein goes on to write, “If you can persuade an opponent that he’s wrong about a political issue, which is nearly impossible, you can win that day’s debate. But, if you can make him feel guilty about his opinion, you’ve got him on the defensive forever.”
Philosopher and theologian Ravi Zacharias is fond of using the old adage, “Any stigma can lick a good dogma.”
And so the Left stigmatized the Right, and they cowered.
No more.
This monstrous gift-of-life Trump has given the Republican Party and non-Leftists of all stripes is the power to simply reject the guilt. He doesn’t care about the labels, he doesn’t care about the stigma he doesn’t even care what they think of him.
Or, as Glenn Reynolds summed up, “He rejects their assumed and phony position of moral and intellectual supremacy. Which is both fair, and painful, because that position is, and always has been, a lie.”
You are entirely correct, because Jesus Christ did not die to salvage an undifferentiated mass of humanity - the communist version - but to redeem individual human beings beyond any counting but by God.
The leftist reads Christ admonishing the rich young man to discard his riches and stridently insists that Jesus was a communist (though they use the euphemism, socialist) and that He vehemently demands that we all throw away all our money (preferably to an all-earthly-powerful Federal government) in order to follow Him.
No: He told that man what he specifically needed to hear. He told the woman at the well what she specifically needed to hear. Yes, there are consistent underlying principles, but extrapolating the passages suggesting pacifism to encompass all persons and to condemn all soldiery is heretical.
As to your first point: The answer is simple and awful: The Crusades, though they contained wrongdoing, were not themselves wrong. They were a just and long overdue response to over four centuries of barbaric invasion, as well as an attempt to redeem Jerusalem from the supreme haters of Christ.
Those potentates in Europe were willing, eagerly or reluctantly, to fight back, to protect themselves and their holdings, if not also to protect the Church, and their people.
The potentates in Europe of today are actively in on it: They hate Western Civilization and Biblical Christianity, and they are using the Second Jihad against Europe as the means to destroy them. We could have a Second Crusades if the leaders and their armies permitted the citizens to defend themselves.
These leaders are Satanic globalists, and they want to plunge the entire world into a collectivist hell - so that they can collect all the swagger that their shriveled little evil - and often pedophilic - hearts desire. (Communists, after all, absolutely love money: They love it so much, they want it all for themselves. Ask Al Gore.)
The Left has been allowed to define the terms of the debate for the past century. Christians in the West have let evil communists preach to them that turning the other cheek is universally required and solely means becoming a passive masochist.
That is just another heresy - a corollary to the above about soldiery. But The Frankfurt School’s Long March Through the Institutions emphatically included the seminaries. So there you have it: Christendom has become just dumb - literally as well as figuratively: It has muzzled and hobbled itself because the commies told it to do so.
I read it. Both interviewer and interviewee were superb.
I can relate to Steyn more than I knew: I am a classically-trained musician, but I am a pop guy at heart, and I have often despaired of churchianity (a significant component of the conservative sphere) ignoring or reviling good music simply because it is secular - or more commonly now, embracing it in an entirely worldly and uncritical manner.
Many of the composers of the great music of the church were neither specifically Christian nor even particularly moral.
Though I am not a big fan of him as a person, Frankie Schaeffer once wrote a book called, Addicted to Mediocrity, about the tendency of Christian/conservative culture to settle for third-rate quality as long as it is separate from what the world produces.
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