[neverdem]

ping

[kalee]

ping

[Cicero]

I really don't think Victor Davis Hanson understands the Pope, or what his initiative has already achieved. Too bad, because I usually enjoy reading his work.

Hanson is a bright guy, but Pope Benedict can think circles around him.

[NutCrackerBoy]

Bump.

[Revolting cat!]

We're not there yet? Oh yes, we're there, we're there! You haven't gotten the memo? The word 'niggardly'is forbidden in our public schools. Computer term 'master/slave' ist verbotten in our gummint. I could go on.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Good writing...

[what's up]

The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason

This article is accurate in just about everything except I think the Greek enlightenment happened in the 6th century BC.

[B.O. Plenty]

bump

[Earthdweller]

Way to go Vic! I'm so glad you picked this up and ran with it.

I have been "yelling" at the "Enlightened" to wakeup for about two years now.

If Europe goes...the US is not far behind.

[Billthedrill]

An angry column from Hanson. I like him angry.

Three French philosophers managed to work up the courage to issue a public statement today that maybe the French teacher who disparaged Islam and is now in hiding shouldn't be killed if the bad guys would be so kind. That's the stuff of the Marne, all right...

In fact European intellectual life has rejected the Enlightenment since Sartre and his coterie of fashionable Marxists took over the academe. Foucault? Baudrillard? Derrida? Lyotard especially, who built a career on criticism of an Enlightenment he patently did not comprehend? These fellows would do very well under dhimmitude so long as they restricted their polemics to the West. Which they did.

European intellectual life will slough off this stifling, enervating multicultural nihilism or it will go under, period. When it does so the world will not miss it, but the tragedy is that it will drag so many of its fellow citizens with it.

[Tench_Coxe]

What Mr Hansen is describing is the setting of a stage--along the lines of a human tragedy. IMHO, either a new Dark Age is on the horizon, or a bloodbath ala the 1930's/1940's. Either way, it isn't going to be pretty.

[Blind Eye Jones]

The Enlightenment has come full circle in Europe: where unaided reason is now meaningless and embraces the irrationality of POMO thought and socialism. What does this mean? POMO thought makes reason frivolous, so that language can only point to more language for meaning and never to anything in the real world; and socialism has abandoned reason by never rationally assessing its own miserable failures in the 20th century. Socialism only offers a dogmatic morality that the "grieved" classes need to be compensated through multiculuralism. The irony is socialism started as a rational experiment under Marx -- communism was considered a science -- but it has come to the conclusion that all cultures are equal, that there is no truth and that power is the final end. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not universal and self evident truths to the socialists. Thus the Lockean formulation was just a prejudice of the west -- a west that has sought to colonize and dominate the less powerful peoples of the world.

POMO thought and socialism (often espoused by the same people) go hand in hand with a virulent rationalism that is irrational -- and this is the legacy of the Enlightenment.

[GOPJ]

And what have we learned in the last five years from its boutique socialism, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism? That it was logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists.

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

Well said.

[hinckley buzzard]

all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?

This is the core of the message--that in a very real way, terror has already won on the conrtinent. The best illustration is not the Pope, but the German opera--shut down not by totalitarian police but by mere fear of cutthroats whom the state is unwilling to control.

[VOA]

bump

[GOPJ]

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

Is this a subtle nod to Freepers?

[RobbyS]

The regnant philosphy is deconstructionism, which embrazons Pilates's question on the wall: What is truth?

[goldstategop]

European Christianity is dead. The craven surrender to Islam reveals Europeans have no real beliefs except immediate self-preservation and enjoying their pampered lifestyle. In short, Europe is really Eurarabia. And the more Europe shows its weakness and its contempt for the values that gave it birth, the bolder its enemy grows along with its assault upon Europe itself. As Europeans have learned in the past five years, their servility to Islam has won them no immunity.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus

[Earthdweller]

[Tolik]

    Victor Davis Hanson Ping ! 

       Let me know if you want in or out.

Links:    FR Index of his articles:  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson 
            His website: http://victorhanson.com/    
                NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
New Link!    http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/