Posted on 10/28/2004 10:26:07 AM PDT by Noumenon
Thank you so much. More comments after I have digested the entire preface.
Good post, Nnnnnnoumen. Long time no see.
The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.
--Will Durant, The Story of Civilization
Sooner or later, and for the sake of our civilization, we are going to have to deal with our domestic enemies.
BTTT! Great Book!
Anything this man writes is worthy of our attention, and all of his books should be in our hard copy libraries. I wish I had even 1% of his insight and knowledge. Right now, I'm making a a third pass through his latest book mentioned above. This timethrough, I'm making notes and commetns. I don't agree with all of his opinions, but these are disagreements that intellectually honest men can make with one another.
Reading this 2004 post is chilling. Because it is right in all of its particulars. Survival of our heritage of freedom is looking faces long odds now. It will take the courage of determined men and women and a miracle or two if we are to avoid a civilization-killing, long and deep Dark Age.
At the moment, Marxism is our nation's most urgent and serious threat. It is occupying center stage. Islam is waiting in the green room.
Only a nation's whose population is thoroughly educated and capable of defending its Judeo Christian priniciples and our nation's founding values is capable of defending against the threats of Marxism and Islam.
I am on these message boards day after day sounding the warning. We MUST MUST MUST shut down our socialist and atheistic government K-12 schools!!! Socialist-funded and atheistic schools can NOT be reformed! They are utterly incapable of preparing our nation's citizens to defend freedom!!!
Conservatives MUST MUST MUST get our nation's children into private conservative schools that will thoroughly and completely integrate into every minute of every school day the Judeo Christian values upon which our nation was founded. Without this "Code of Honor", we are facing a 1,000 year long Dark Age.
Nice multi-level turn of phrase and metaphor. So many peeple are clueless about this. or are in complete denial.
The enemy challenges the Enlightenment’s insistence on the supremacy of pure reason by forcing us to respect those code of honor whose foundation is far more visceral than rational, a fact that explains the modern intellectual’s hatred for such codes in whatever guise they lurk. The enemy requires the continued existence of large groups of men and women who refuse to question authority and who are happy to take on blind faith the traditions that have been passed down to them. The enemy necessitates the careful cultivation of such high-testosterone values as brute physical courage and unthinking loyalty to a leader. The enemy demands instinctual patriotism and what Ibn Khaldun calls “group feeling,” that is, the sense of identification with one’s own people. The enemy propels into positions of command men who are accustomed to taking risks and who are willing to gamble with the lives of others, and shuns aside those who prefer the leisure of contemplation to the urgency of action. Lastly, the enemy shatters the Enlightenment’s visions of utopia, of Kant’s epoch of perpetual peace and of the end of history.The other reason that Harris doesn't mention is that many European and American intellectuals agree with our enemies, in that they wish to see our civilization destroyed. It is nothing less than the worst kind of betrayal, a civilizational suicide. It is a sick desire borne of self-hatred that condemns countless generations to slavery, servitude and slaughter. This is why I can make no peace with liberals or their ilk. They are like a cancer with which no negotiation or accomodation is possible.And this is why so many European and American intellectuals refuse to acknowledge today even the possibility of the enemy’s existence, concocting theories to explain the actions of Al-Qaeda as something other than what they were.
I agree. Our children are our repositories of the knowledge and courage that makes freedom possible. We must guard, tend and teach. No one else will. Waht sort of response do you get to your work on other forums?
There are three responses:
** Those from clueless conservatives that believe that if somehow we could go back to some magical decade in government schooling, or eliminate unions, or have a minute of prayer in an atheistic day, or close down the Department of Education...etc....that somehow we could reform socialist-funded and atheistic government schools.
**Those from professional trolls who are paid by the NEA.
** Those very FEW conservatives who “get it”. Those few conservatives who understand that socialist-funded government schooling can NOT NOT NOT be reformed. Those conservatives who understand that simply by sending a child into government schools, the child learns to be comfortable taking money from his neighbor to pay for a service their parents want tuition-free.
Marxism is our nation's most urgent and serious threat. Government K-12 schools are the Marxists’ most powerful weapon against us.
I’ve just purchased four more copies used at $2.00 each. I’ll be giving them away...
Gratuitous bump for rference...
I just downloaded this book and the The Next American Civil War onto our Kindle. Dr. Quigley's T&H (1966, First Printing) is scheduled to arrive on July 2. Add these to the pile of books my son got me for Father's Day and I will be longing for rainy weekends and nothing too urgent to attend to in the shop!
Brief comment on the Enemies: Both (Marxist-Statists and Islam) have already become firmly entrenched within. No need to be overly concerned with external threats at this point, the internal threats have already outstripped our flanks. IMO.
But this is the sort of discussion that all of us need to have, especially now. Modern civilizations rise and fall according to the people they produce and the ideas they follow and hold dear. And are willing to defend.
Right now, I've begun a careful re-read of the latest edition of The Road to Serfdom, and I've got Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics on the way. After reading Quigley, Hayek's efforts to get his work published assume new meaning and context.
Dinner beckons, so I'll close this now. Good evening, all.
You might have thought that Harris’ work would get more play here.
Trying to get up to speed on both Delsol and Harris...(Not withstanding this latest Noumenon thread...{:-))
My schedule getting a couple of guys ready for a competiton is pretty time-consuming...
I won't be wading ashore in front of photographers....but "I shall return" to this discussion...
An ‘interesting times’ bump
The ethical sides of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam sought to counteract harshness, egocentricity, tribalism, cruelty, scorn of work and of one’s fellow creatures, but these efforts, on the whole, have met with little success throughout the length of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis. Of the three, Christianity, possibly because it set the highest standards of the three, has fallen furthest from achieving its aims. Love, humility, brotherhood, cooperation, the sanctity of work, the fellowship of community, the image of man as a fellow creature made in the image of God, respect for women as personalities and partners of men, mutual helpmates on the road to spiritual salvation, and the vision of our universe, with all of its diversity, complexity, and multitude of creatures, as a reflection of the power and goodness of God – these basic aspects of Christ’s teachings are almost totally lacking throughout the Pakistani-Peruvian axis and most notably absent on the “Christian” portion of that axis from Sicily, or even the Aegean Sea, westward to Baja California and Tierra del Fuego. Throughout the whole axis, human actions are not motivated by these “Christian virtues,” but by the more ancient Arabic personality traits, which become vices and sins in the Christian outlook: harshness, envy, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, and hatred.
Brilliant.
Wishing you & yours a belated Merry Christmas!
You know, it took a second pass through T&H AND Evolution of Civilizations before I truly understood the import of what Quigley was getting at with respect to his analysis of The Pakistani-Peruvian Axis
There is another. Another axis of cruelty and disregard for human life made all the worse in some respects by its veneer of culture and pretensions to a "higher" civilization that it affects. This what I term the Slavic-Teutonic Axis - a combination of Asiatic despotism, Slavic nihilism and Teutonic will-to-power (part of the Teutonic outlook) that in modern times, gave rise to two of the most monstrous and murderous ideologies and outlooks the world has ever seen, and that continues unchecked to this day. It was a stunning realization, and one of the last pieces of the puzzle to fall into place. More as this develops, as the notion of the Slavic-Teutonic Axis essentially completes the chain of thought that is the foundation for my book.
But there was even more to it than that. The collapse of the Roman Empire decoupled the idea of society from the principle of its 'ownership' by the state. It became evident that society as such was able to operate on its own during the Dark Ages betwee nempires. This was at a huge variance with the idea that state and society were one and the same, the latter being 'owned' by the former. As Quigley put it:
This experience had revolutionary effects. It was discovered that man can live without a state; this became the basis of Western liberalism. It was discovered that the state, if it exists, must serve men and that it is incorrect to believe that the purpose of men is to serve the state. It was discovered that economic life, religious life, law, and private property can all exist and function effectively without a state. From this emerged laissez-faire, separation of Church and State, rule of law, and the sanctity of private property. In Rome, in Byzantium, and in Russia, law was regarded as an enactment of a supreme power. In the West, when no supreme power existed, it was discovered that law still existed as the body of rules which govern social life. Thus law was found by observation in the West, not enacted by autocracy as in the East. This meant that authority was established by law and under the law in the West, while authority was established by power and above the law in the East. The West felt that the rules of economic life were found and not enacted; that individuals had rights independent of, and even opposed to, public authority; that groups could exist, as the Church existed, by right and not by privilege, and without the need to have any charter of incorporation entitling them to exist as a group or act as a group; that groups or individuals could own property as a right and not as a privilege and that such property could not be taken by force but must be taken by established process of law. It was emphasized in the West that the way a thing was done was more important than what was done, while in the East what was done was far more significant than the way in which it was done.
This outlook represents a hughe and unbridgeable gap between the niominally Christian West and, well, virtually everyone else. The upshot is that the relatively shot time (in the historical sense) that we here in the West have experiences freedom stands in sharp and irreconcilable ccontrast with the way in which the world has worked for everyone else on the planet. Combine the Pakistani-Preuvian Axis with the Scandanavian-Slavic Axis, and you've not got much left. Except for the brief and shining example of America. And the hour is growing late for us.
We who believe in individual freedom and all of the other principles of our brief Western civilization are at non-negotiable, irreconcilable odds with most of the rest of the world. In short, we're playing for everything there is. The triumph of our enemies - the triumph of the will-to-power - will usher in an age of slaughter, cruelty, barbarity and slavery from which the human race may never recover.
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