When the Wolves Get Religion
Letter From Turkey
The city of Istanbul reflects Turkey’s transformation over the past decade. Almost eight years after my previous visit I am greeted by an impressive new international terminal at the Atatürk International Airport—Europe’s seventh busiest—and by the massive office towers and apartment complexes surrounding it. According to OECD, on current form Turkey may be the second-largest economy in Europe by 2050.
The city’s population has grown by a half since 2003, from nine to thirteen million, making it by far the most populous megalopolis on European soil. That the street crowds are unevenly urbanized is more apparent than before, reflecting the ongoing influx from rural Anatolia and Turkey’s continuing demographic boom. Half the country’s 73 million people are under the age of 30, and even with declining fertility rates it is expected to reach 100 million by mid-century.
More significantly, Istanbul is now visibly a Muslim city. The old cliché about the crossroads between the West and the Islamic world apparently still applies to the bustling cafes of Cihangir or smart boutiques of Nisantasi, but these are shrinking oases inhabited by the Kemalist elite and their offspring. The balance is tilting in favor of the teeming multitude around the Fatih mosque, which last Friday was unsurprisingly headscarved (women) and bearded (men). The same marks of Islamic piety are now present more widely and in greater numbers than at any time since Mustafa Kemal’s days. In some residential areas the hijab is by now dominant. It is ubiquitous in public places and institutions where old restrictions formally still apply but have been ignored with impunity for years.
These visible fruits of nine years’ rule by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) invoke the memory of its previous leader, Necmettin Erbakan, who announced many years ago that ”Turkey is going to change its regime towards fundamentalism—the debate is whether it is going to be with blood or without.” The change of the Turkish state and society, of its ethos and institutional culture, is less visible but profound and probably irreversible. The secularist elites see it happening, “but they are gripped by panic, paralyzed, unable to act, living just for today,” Claire Berlinski, an American-born writer and journalist who has lived in Istanbul for years, told me last Friday. She compares the atmosphere in the city to the last days of the Weimar Repuiblic in Berlin: the writing may be on the wall, but the “dread and exhilaration of the looming catastrophe” is intoxicating. Nevertheless she would not live anywhere else (and moving with her seven adopted cats could be a problem).
There may be less than meets the eye to Turkey’s economic success, Claire Berlinski warns (“Turkish statistics are the product of a combination of ineptitude and deceit”), and it is unable to absorb the young newcomers to the labor market. Nevertheless, the Western media and politicians remain infatuated with the twin myth of Turkey’s “Islamic democracy” and AKP-engineered prosperity. Sensing a mix of Western weakness and wishful thinking, Prime Minister Erdogan now asserts that the tables have been turned: in the decades ahead, Europe will need Turkey more than Turkey needs Europe. “European labor markets and social-security systems are comatose,” he writes, and “European societies are near geriatric,” in contrast to Turkey which is “bursting with the vigor that the EU so badly needs”:
Our European friends should realize that Turkey-EU relations are fast approaching a turning point… Turkey is a regional player, an international actor with an expanding range of soft power and a resilient, sizable economy. And yet, the fact that it can withstand being rebuffed should not become reason for Turkey’s exclusion. Sometimes I wonder if Turkey’s power is an impediment to its accession to the Union. If so, one has to question Europe’s strategic calculations … We are no more a country that would wait at the EU’s door like a docile supplicant. Some claim that Turkey has no real alternative to Europe … However, the opposite is just as valid. Europe has no real alternative to Turkey. Especially in a global order where the balance of power is shifting, the EU needs Turkey to become an ever stronger, richer, more inclusive, and more secure Union. I hope it will not be too late before our European friends discover this fact.
Too late for what? The implied threat is that Turkey would turn against “Europe” if it is not admitted into the EU, which is in itself an eloquent argument against admission. No responsible family would unlock the door to an uninvited guest with a long criminal record who threatens unpleasantness if he is not admitted. The EU with Turkey in its ranks would be weaker, poorer, and infinitely less safe.
A generation ago various groups of ultranationalist and Islamist Turks fought each other in the streets. As columnist Burak Bekdil noted in The Hurriyet (Jan. 21), the ultranationalists killed Islamists because they highlighted their religion before their Turkishness, and, likewise, the Islamists killed ultranationalists because they highlighted their Turkishness before their faith. A historic reconciliation is now under way: Turkish ultranationalists are becoming Islamists and Islamists are becoming ultranationalists. When they join forces, under the AKP’s guidance, the game for Turkey’s secularists will be over. It is to be hoped that it will not be too late for Europe to discover the true nature of the regime on its southeastern borders.
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On the unusual background to my meeting with Miss Berlinski, check out
http://ricochet.com/main-feed/A-Funny-Story-of-Manners-and-Mixed-Identity
Islam is not liberalizable. As Dr. T shows us, the descendants of Kemalists and Baathists who were seduced from their ancestral religion by the magnificent materialistic opulence of liberal-bourgeois-postcalvinist industrial society are beginning to see the decrepitude and imperpetuity of the Occident's shameful little dance around reality, and they are losing faith in secular humanism. Liberalism is an offshoot of Christianity, and the more wealthy pseudo-Westernized secularists in the Muslim world see how disappointingly it has lived up to its promises, the less they will be able to promote it among their pious brethren.
We are doomed for as long as the Western thought police refuse to acknowledge these basic truths. It would seem the only long-term solution is the elimination of our thought police.
NGPM (@2):
“Islam is not liberalizable.”
Plutarch, in his life of Pyrrhus, tells us that, during Pyrrhus’ campaign in Italy, his physician sent a letter to the Roman consul Fabricius with an offer to poison his master. Fabricius sent the letter to Pyrrhus with this message: “We do not send you this information because of any love we bear you, but because we do not wish your downfall to bring any reproach upon us, nor to have men say of us that we brought this war to an end by treachery because we could not do so by our own valor” (Penguin translation).
It would seem that our policy vis-à-vis the Mahometan nations follows the path rejected by Fabricius. We seek to inject them with the poison of liberalism because we know that we cannot defeat them in a fair fight. I respect those nations that have adhered to their religion (even a false one) and have kept their birth rates up by rejecting feminism. If we are going to avoid the threat that Mahometans pose (and it wouldn’t be such a great threat if we Westerners placed stronger restrictions on immigration and withdrew support from Israel), it should be through our recovery of the Faith in its religious, social, and political fullness, not by exposing the peoples of the East to the same pathogens that are killing us.
If we are to lose in this constructed battle with Mahometanism, I wonder whether it would be better for the true Christian to live under the Caliphate than under liberal-secular (“soft”) totalitarianism. Christian communities thrived in the Arab states until the U.S. began meddling. The question: Is Liberalism or Islam the greater threat to Christians? I suspect that those who kill the soul are worse than those who kill the body.
@ #1 ST:
Hysterical. Wasn't that a Seinfeld episode?
Let me get this straight. Claire Berlinski has been reading Srdja Trifkovic's articles for 20 years but somehow believed she has actually met him, even when she had not?!
That is surreal.
Her account of the episode is heart-warmingly honest, my pretense that I "remembered" makes it mutually embarrassing, and some of the comments on her blog are quite funny, e.g.
Someone notify Oxford American Dictionary... new entrants on the way: “Déjà Claire” – the feeling you get when a close friend or colleague is someone you have never met.
Claire, if I ever meet you some day, it will be a wonderful reunion.
I bet this happens to Charlie Sheen all the time, except in more graphic detail. Probably costs more too, but that's a whole 'nother story.
Claire,
I am Srdja Trifkovic!!!
@ 7 robert:
LMAO . . . that is even more funny.
"Christian communities thrived in the Arab states until the U.S. began meddling."
I am against U.S. meddling in the Arab states. But it simply is not true that Christian communities thrived under Muslim rule until the U.S. began its buffoonery. Nothing thrives under Muslim rule.
OK, OK, it's amusing & funny... but how about some insightful comments on the AKP-driven post-Kemalist grand design and its geopolitical implications?
The dilemma the EU has to resolve is whether by welcoming Turkey as a club member, the country will reverse its recent shift towards Islamic fundamentalism or, by continuing to blackball the candidate member, things will somehow change for the better anyway. It seems to me that the first rule of clubs is members cherish 'belonging' above everything else and this means conforming to the unwritten rules of club conduct, unwritten because every member instictively knows what they are and the prospect of being expelled from the club is just too horrible to contemplate.
@Antiphon: don't kid yourself. Between the beheading for conversion and the impossibility of a return to clandestine Christianity in an Islamic society, it would only be a matter of time before the Faith disappeared from the face of the Earth. Add this to Islam's penchant for terror and you will see just how much it has in common with the radical Left. And unlike Leftism, Islam does not eventually collapse or rot under the pressure of its own folly.
I submit that 1. the Mohammedan threat is inseparable from the Leftist threat, and 2. if the two were separable, the Mohammedans would be if anything far more menacing.
The fact that Islam is not liberalizable, by the way, should by no means be construed as a vote in favor of the denaturation of Christendom. It was meant to chastise those who seek to inoculate the Islamic menace with postmodern decadence: Islam is not a part of our [Christians'] world and it will never be assimilable to the libertines', either. If I chastise the libertines it is out of fraternal love, for many of them are distant cousins but far more closely related to myself than is almost any Mohammedan and as the descendants of Christians they have the vestages of a cultural memory that I cherish. I cannot say the same for Muslims.
Dr. Trifkovic,
I had always thought Turkey's fate was cast when they refused to allow American forces to attack Iraq from the North. But when you write: "the Western media and politicians remain infatuated with the twin myth of Turkey’s “Islamic democracy” and AKP-engineered prosperity", it gives me pause.
The following statement is indisputable, "A historic reconciliation is now under way: Turkish ultranationalists are becoming Islamists and Islamists are becoming ultranationalists. When they join forces, under the AKP’s guidance, the game for Turkey’s secularists will be over."
In 2003 Pat Buchanan wrote,
"No one knows for certain how it will play out. Most Europeans and Arabs, and many Americans, fear a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq will lead to a Middle East upheaval in which Islamic extremists, hell-bent on a war of civilizations with the West, could come to power.
Neoconservatives, wild for war, predict a "cakewalk" that liberates the people of Iraq from a bloody tyrant and begins the long-overdue democratization of the Arab and Islamic world."
Where is Bush/Cheney Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and "Little Bill" Kristol after all the cake and cookies have been served?
Dr. Trifkovic,
That comment by Erdogan... There is no way around it. It is, as you wrote, offensive. Do you think it was intentionally so by Erdogan --offending Europeans and appealing to both the ultranationalists and Islamists, as if he's already decided it's too late to get Turkey into the EU so he might as well score points at home?
CMC: It is not insignificant that Erdogan's arrogant op-ed ("The Robust Man of Europe") was published in the latest edition of our very own "Newsweek"
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/17/the-robust-man-of-europe.html
Turkey is never getting in the EU before the EU implodes. Turkey is not anytime soon getting back in the Balkans. Indeed many Balkan Moslems who over-relied on the now weakening US/ NATO might be heading once again for Istanbul. Turkey will be worried and struggling enough to hold off the Kurds and even the irredentist Armenians. Turkey traditionally goes "Islamist" when it's time to commit genocide. Most of the Turks I've met or socialized with or worked with are generally comfortable with a less than "Islamic" lifestyle, the women to a surprising extent. Until they go genocidal. Which they always do. As to where Christian communities can thrive in an Islamic sea? Wherever they have a Christian "state" and weapons. That would be places like Nagorno-Karabakh(Artsakh)...the mountains of Lebanon... Republika Srpska....you get my point.
Turkey is an enemy of the West. The country is home to a violent, barbarous people. They are devoutly muslim, and, once they gain numeric superiority, will not tolerate non-muslims. If you support Turkey, then you advocate for yourself to swing from a tree. Period.
Bernie (@ 9):
Point taken. “Thrived” was a bit strong. Substitute, instead, “survived” and “achieved a certain stability”. My knowledge of Christian life under the Mahometans is based mostly on my memories of reading Albert Hourani’s history of the Arabs. I have the distinct impression that, though second-class citizens, Christian communities were tolerated and even treated well-enough at times because they provided contact with the western Christian powers. (By the way, the same goes for Jewries of the Near East.)
The question is: Now that Islam is radicalized (where it is radicalized) would the Mahometans be able to revert to toleration, esp. in the face of the West’s abandonment of Christianity? Put another way: Now that the French, English, etc. would not be demanding the safety of Christians under Mahometan rule, would these modern day Caliphs treat Christians reasonably?
Another question: Does anybody really, seriously think that the West is in danger of world-wide Islamic conquest? I know that Europe is facing heavy Arab immigration, but would our masters really allow the New World Order to be scrapped by a bunch of people who don’t have nuclear weapons?
Don’t you think, rather, that the Mahometans are a useful distraction? The more they rattle their scimitars, the more we turn to our own corrupt governments to save us. I suspect that a “whiff of grapeshot” judiciously applied will end the “Islamo-fascist” threat, when it is no longer serving its purpose. It is partly this suspicion that makes me pity the Mahometans more than I fear them. They’re dupes of the same powers (and I am not speaking in riddles in order to veil their identity) that have eroded Christendom.
'...[T]he Islamists killed ultranationalists because they highlighted their Turkishness before their faith.'
I believe that it would be more than idle pedantry to correct a mistake which a very good writer and analyst as Dr. Trifkovic has rushed into like his many inferiors in the press. Mohammedanism is not a 'faith', in fact until the Christian revelation 'faith' was not an article of religion much at all. The Mohammedans know of the truth of their religion as they have the Koran as proof; made of an incorruptible divine substance transmitted to the Prophet from Heaven (hence its wrapping in a green cloth). The Jews by maintaing race purity and keeping the Law hold God to his promise of the Covenant - again no faith required. Hindooism and the classical or Oriental idolatries also need no faith. Buddhism could be said to be a faith if it did not deny the reality of an omnipotent divine creator. For the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian alone arises the importance of faith in the person of Jesus Christ as the Logos, the Word of God. (Protestants, who stagger from one heresy to another, like the Moslems, hold a book - the Bible - to be the Word of God not Christ Himself.)
Other than that trifle, a judicious and intriguing examination of the new Turkish threat Dr Trifkovic. I'm quite sorry for the atrocities committed in your nation by my devil of a countryman David Hicks, a Moslem convert who fought for the Kosovar Annexation Army. Although, if the Anglo-Judaeo-American condominium falls (as appears likely), I hope that a resuscitated Orthodox Russia might interpose to protect the Balkan Christians from Turkish malevolence.
NGPM (@ 12):
“...it would only be a matter of time before the Faith disappeared from the face of the Earth.”
As we both know, this is not possible.
“...if the two were separable, the Mohammedans would be if anything far more menacing.”
I disagree. Mahometanism has always been an external threat. Islamic armies invaded Europe—Christian armies drove them off. After the initial phase of conquest/conversion’ the Caliphate, so far as I understand, allowed Christians (and Jews) to live on in the nations of N. Africa and the Near East. Mahometans recognize the transcendent and live in many ways according to nature: women are kept in place, modesty is encouraged, contraception is avoided, sodomy abominated, etc. The main problem with Islam, of course, is that it is misguided. It’s misunderstood God. It doesn’t hate God, it just doesn’t know God. It is evil, but perhaps more in the sense that good is absent or unknown.
Liberalism, on the other hand, hates God. Liberalism is evil because it is the opposite of good. It is the inversion of the Church and the inveterate enemy of the Church. It seeks Her destruction, along with God’s. It celebrates all that is perverted and evil. Women kill babies in their womb and even kill, through contraception, the potential of babies. Sodomites run amok. Divorce, fornication, adultery are condoned and celebrated. Vice is virtue.
Worse, Liberalism is a hidden threat at times. The agony of the Church over the last century has not been the infiltration of the sanctuary by Mahometans, but by Liberals. It is the smoke of Satan, not the smoke of “Allah” that has entered. Liberalism is enervating and destructive and deceitful.
Finally, as I suggested in my last post: let us come out from behind nanny’s apron and cease being children. Islam is not a threat in its own right. “Islamo-fascist terror” will disappear as quickly as it appeared once the Liberal terror-apparatus is fully in place, installed by good “Christian” anti-Islamists who would rather see the triumph of the New World Order than the bogey-Caliphate.
All things being equal, provided that the Caliph tolerated the Church, as it did in Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Spain, etc. and provided that I and my family were allowed to live in peace, even if cut off from civil society, I would prefer life under the Caliph in a Christian ghetto to life in these here United States once the war on the Faith really begins to heat up.
Antiphon: no, of course the Church must subsist until the end of time, but it would nevertheless be irresponsible to resign oneself to life under a regime that, over time, would reduce Christianity to a precious few less and less lively ghettos with absolutely no hope of growth or regeneration. Leftism is at least killing itself off due to youth suicide (the rate at which European youths attempt suicide, by the way, is 10 percent--one of the starkest condemations of the society and regime the last three generations have produced) and low fertility rates. One cannot say the same for Islam.
If Islam, moreover, has merely a "distorted" view of God, then why do you condemn the Deism of Voltaire and the Scottish Rite as "hatred of God"? Islam does not believe in the same God as the Christians, and their conception of God is even further from the Christian Trinity than the outdated Judaic vision of God the Father. The ethic of Islam is completely divorced from the ethic of Christianity.
For that matter, neither you nor I have ever experienced life among a Muslim majority (though for a few brief months I borrowed an apartment on the border between the Jewish and Muslim zones in Paris). It is not a fair argument to compare an idyllic state of dhimmitude ("provided my family and I were able to live in peace") with the most vicious expressions of libertine society. Both types have their laxer periods and their nastier periods. And what makes you think the internal "peace" and "tolerance" of your idyllic benign caliphate--I'm taking the Ottoman Empire that my socialist medieval history professor seemed to drool over--would not be periodically interrupted by the seizure of your sons to be torn from their religion and raised as Janissaries, the seizure of your daughters to bear the Sultan's bastards in the harem and bogis accusations against your person, in which case you had better pray you have at least double the witnesses of your accusor?
Finally, as to our spineless elites, they may not want to see Europe Islamized, but they lack both the vision to admit that it could happen and the spine to do anything productive about it. Within ten years, if things keep going as they have, there will likely be war in some parts of Europe. I will take the side of my own people against the Almohrads, under the banner of Charles Martel.
I should qualify my words, by the way, with the admission that to the extent Antiphon argues that living under dhimmitude was generally better than living under the democratized Islamic Republics created at the U.S.'s behest, I am in general agreement, though the Armenians and Assyrians of the dying Ottoman Empire might have begged to differ.
Where I disagree is on this: it does not follow that life under the control of the U.S. occupier is or is likely to become worse than dhimmitude. I also believe an Islamic conquest is possible, that the results would not be preferable to our current regime and that the absence ofany Christian or post-Christian powers would not bode well for the Christians living under dhimmitude.
@3
We seek to inject them with the poison of liberalism because we know that we cannot defeat them in a fair fight.
Actually we can. It was done at Vienna and Lepanto and some other places besides. Unfortunately, since tolerance is the virtue of an empire in decline, we sort of experiment with poisons until somebody shunts us off to detox. That somebody will be Russia when they "get revenge" for the atrocities committed against them. Mecca will then be flat and black and will glow in the dark.
I wonder why the Turkish armed forces - always a bastion of vehemently secular Kemalism folded so easily. Only in the 1990s they overthrew another Islamist government and now, they're just standing by and letting the AKP geld them. Was it the fact that younger officers are Islamicized or did the AKP bribe the army by promising them that their authority wouldn't be interfered with or was it a combination of both?
Metaphorically speaking, Turkey is a front corporation led by a business tactician who is mapping his territory by forging partnerships that capture key accounts, impede competition, and re-establish an empire. Western leaders (major neocons included) failed to recognize that this “new” company is led by a former Fortune 500 CEO (Erdogan - radical Islamist whose Grandfather was an Ottoman I believe killed by an Armenian) who restructured under Chapter 11 (Turkey’s 2001 economic collapse) and strategically re-emerged with his Board of Directors under the AKP blanket.
Geopolitically, Turkey has a nice economy and is doing their best to leverage their place on the map by alienating former allies and attempting to build alliances with other Islamist countries and radical groups (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.). Although they share a common religious sect, I am not so sure the Arab countries will trust him. Then there is Iran. Erdogan has reached out to Ahmadinejad (seemingly amicable), but Iran has invested a ton of money and energy in building key accounts with Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., and there is no way they’ll let Erdogan infiltrate their portfolio (not to mention the power-ego clash between the leaders). However, it will be interesting to see if the Iranian people are more loyal to “Persia” or “Turkish” roots, as they have a very heavy Turkish base (Azerbaijanis). On the flip, the Arab countries and Iran come with some serious baggage, and I’m not so sure Turkey is ready to assume these conflicts (however, I could be mistaken).
Then we have the Russian-Turkey relationship surrounding energy pipelines / delivery. Turkey just gave Russia permission to use the Black Sea to deliver European gas with the agreement that the same company will build a pipeline that reaches across Turkey and down to the Mediterranean. However, a radical, Islamist Turkey may have some serious conflicts in the near future with Russia, as I do not believe Russia trusts them in the slightest. Bring in the Georgia and Armenia issues, and this could be a sharp thorn.
Across the Black Sea, Turkey continues to build their relationship with the Ukraine - - - increased trade and an easement in Visa requirements.
However, if Turkey successfully forges these alliances, the radical Ottoman Empire will rise from history - - - an extremely serious problem with dire implications. I'm just unsure if the youth in their country won't rebel (?)
Geopolitically, one of the biggest tactical errors made by the US was not swallowing our pride and building a strong tie with Russia. Our inability to plant grape vines and olive branches with rising, long-term players was the failure of our “strategic depth.”
S.B.
"Geopolitically, one of the biggest tactical errors made by the US was not swallowing our pride and building a strong tie with Russia. Our inability to plant grape vines and olive branches with rising, long-term players was the failure of our “strategic depth.”
And who might have been responsible for queering the deal? What were the real reasons and what were the purported reasons given to the lowly masses who were weighing down their government with burdensome entitlements as they awaited their governments next call to arms?
Thank you for the good post.
#26
It was reported that plans for a coup were uncovered by the government, several military officers were condemned or punished, and the hint was given that the government is on to the military and watching it. Source is the Economist from several months back.
There are heaps of "newly discovered" allegedly incriminating documents -- most of them probably bogus -- but the purpose has been achieved: the Army has been declawed. Check out
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=sledgehammer-under-question-by-suspects-relatives-2011-01-17
The allegations reported about the Sledgehammer documents suggest that the Turkish military was planning attacks that it would blame on others. While they may be completely false, the very same daily Hurriyet has also suggested several times that the Turkish army conducts attacks that are later blamed on the Kurdistan Worker's Party, no?
Yes, quite likely bogus, but very plausible given the somewhat harsh nature of the Turkish Army.
Mr. Gervaise (@ 24):
“We seek to inject them with the poison of liberalism because we know that we cannot defeat them in a fair fight.” (Antiphon @3)
“Actually we can. It was done at Vienna and Lepanto and some other places besides.” (Gervaise)
Lepanto was a victory for the Holy League against the Turk. The Holy League had been formed by Pope St. Pius V from among the Catholic states and kingdoms of Europe. The victory was attributed to the intercession of Our Lady obtained through Her Rosary. In thanksgiving the Pope instituted the feast day of Our Lady of Victory (still kept as the feast of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary on 7 October).
Vienna was another victory for the Holy League against the Turk. The hero of the battle was the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, who before the battle had entrusted his army to the protection of Our Lady of Czestochowa. In recognition of Our Lady’s help Pope Innocent XI extended the feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary to the universal Church. It is celebrated to this day on 12 September to commemorate the victory.
If we follow the example of these defenders of Christendom and place our hope in Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary we shall indeed win the day. Is that what has been done? Is W the new Sobieski? Is NATO the new Holy League? Take a look sometime at Paolo Veronese’s painting of the Battle of Lepanto. Do you think that this is W’s vision of the war against “Terror”?
By the way, an interesting point:
Battle of Vienna (September 11-12) = Al Qaeda’s attack on WTC
Battle of Lepanto (October 7) = beginning of War in Afghanistan
I don’t know what to make of this.
#31 Antiphon
October: my birthday, wedding anniversary, my son's name day, and the month of my chrismation. Looks like I have another victory to celebrate at Oktoberfest!
THe biggest threat to Christianity is the very nature of the Christianity that is practices today in the West, which is a cheap knock off of the real McCoy. Someone once said that a rleigion without vices was a dead religion. Well, that pretty much sums up global Christianity as a whole. Who was responsible for this? The corporations and their secular lefty lackeys. Add to that the majority of churches/clergymen are too afraid to speak out in fear of losing their tax emeption status, or losing money by turning away half hearted Christians(Josh McDowell no less estimated that 90% of Christians were frauds), and you have a recipe for a total disaster for the Christian religion.
exemption, not emeption
@Antiphon: at the risk of sounding crass, I think one would be hard-pressed to find a spot on the calendar that does NOT mark a day when Christians were fending off Muslims.
@33 Robert
A fraud rate of 90% is a major vice!
Much of what passes for evangelical charismania is viewing God as a sugar daddy who'll give us new cars and houses in order to make us happy. Yet somehow, those are apparently not the sources of happiness, because based on personal observation my suburban neighborhood is chock full of affluent misery.
I agree that Christianity has been seriously dumbed-down. Just compare the latest hymnals with ones that date back to the late Victorian era. When the Washington Post stated that Christians are "poor, unintelligent, and easy to command," they were calling the situation as they saw it. Being faithful can be hard work.
Mr. Bruce (@ 33):
“The biggest threat to Christianity is the very nature of the Christianity that is practiced today in the West, which is a cheap knock off of the real McCoy.”
Precisely the reason why Liberalism is a greater threat than Mahometanism.
There is a question to which I don’t have the answer (yes, only one!): Can Christians accept Mahometans as allies in the fight against Liberalism?
On many things Mahometans, by which I primarily mean the Arab and Persian varieties, have maintained traditions rooted in our nature better than the Liberal (a.k.a. secular, post-Christian) West.
Sharia Law, as I understand it, is at its basis religious law. Like most primitive (I don’t mean this as a pejorative) it is concerned with matters of the family and faith.
Women are kept out of public life, where they do not belong. As wives, they are subordinate to their husbands; as mothers, they are expected to be fruitful and multiply. Abortion, so far as I know, is condemned, as is contraception.
There is no separation of Mosque and State. In Iran this is a bit of a problem, as the spiritual leaders are also temporal rulers. But generally in the Islamic world things are more akin to Christendom, in that Islam is the State religion even if religious leaders are not actually ruling.
Their outlook on the world is religious. The mundane is secondary to the transcendent. This is especially on display in their penchant for suicide missions.
They have a healthy dose of suspicion regarding the Jews and especially the Zionists.
Yes, their faith is false. I have no sympathy for them in this regard. Also, I acknowledge the centuries of enmity between them and the true Faith and I am (by the grace of God) on the side of the latter. I am not advocating that we all become Mahometans. I am merely wondering whether, in the face of a common and totalitarian enemy, viz. Liberalism, there might be some scope for joint action.
I am merely wondering whether, in the face of a common and totalitarian enemy, viz. Liberalism, there might be some scope for joint action.
Islam has nothing to fear from the totalitarianism of the Left, with which it has much in common. Islam may despise secularism but Muslims are more likely to side with the Left in the Christians' domain. Just think of the postcolonial narrative: ripe for victimizing the Muslims. Islam can do this without fear of emasculation, Leftism being a virus native to Christianized culture. Don't you think Muslims in the Middle East see their resident Christians as potential conduits of the Occidental corruption they don't want?
I wouldn't say Islam inspired Leftism, but this latter shares many convergent points with the former. Perhaps that is why Enlightenment writers so admired it, if only in passing. Islam may hate Leftism in principle, but since Allah is conceived as a god capable of lying, there is no need for a Muslim to see such cooperation as compromise.
No, we should be turning the tables and play the Left and Islam off one another.
NGPM@38,
What do you think our grand government is doing in the ME as we speak? Why are we there? To make these pesky Islamic states a spitting image of ourselves, a leftist state if there ever was one. We have seen the great Liberal vs Islam war raging on for about a decade already, with the seeds being planted in 1919.
NGPM@13,
Islam can't be liberlized because our handlers don't want that. They need an enemy to fight to justify huge, out of this world defense spending. That being said, Islam wouldn't be half as radical if we would have stayed out of the region altogether. I remember what an old professor of mine, Dr. Sabki(Syrian)said about how it was in Lebanon and Egypt before the Iranian Revolution. Everyone tried to emulate European dress, values, smoking, tc. Egyptian babes on the beaches in Alexandria in bikinis. After the blowback occured, that all was lost.
Mr. Bruce, that is the whole point! Look at what has happened to Christianity after three centuries of leftist onslaught: total emasculation. Now look what has happened to Islam after a century of leftist onslaught: harder, firmer enshrinement in its followers' hearts. I am told the ancient Persian wine industry was still thriving on the eve of the Iranian Revolution: Islam had never managed to fully conquer the hearts of the Persian people. Same, as you suggest, for the Egyptians and Lebabese. These were peoples with preexisting grand civilizations (Persian, Coptic, Phoenecian)--historically the fanatical Muslim converts were the shamanistic and savage tribes: Arabians and Turkics. The militant liberal onslaught was the best friend Islam ever had. Without it Islam could never have completed its mental Arabization of the Copts and Persians. Everything I have seen about the Iranian revolution suggests that Islamic leaders have been masterly at co-opting Western notions of popular press and propaganda--journals, TV, demagoguery: typical outlets by which lectures have bypassed traditional defense structures to stir up the people very directly--to win the hearts of their countries. Unlike leftism, there is a formal sacriduty involved, making this process so much the less reversible and all the more dangerous to Christianity and indeed to civilization period. (Side note: I have never found myself able to be close friends with a teetotaler and while not everyone needs to be a wine-drinker, I do not believe it is possible for a civilized people on the whole NOT to drink wine. I don't live for wine, but the Islamic interdiction of it just underlines the joylessness and colorlessness of that religion. Too much green. And the only time we see red is when they cut our throats.)
It is not, however, Islam that was radicalized, but these peoples who became more radically Islamicized. True Islam, however, cannot be anything other than radical. No less than Anne-Marie Delcambre, a highly qualified Islamologue, has sharply criticized the media for inventing the P.C. distinction between "Islam" and "Islamism." Dr. T has written about Sudden Jihad Syndrome--a fairly common but little-reported phenomenon whereupon seemingly Westernized and moderate young Muslim men quickly return to the radical and murderous behavioral patterns of their faith.
Bottom line: if pious Muslims invade the country I live in to overthrow our metrosexual president and his mannequin concubine, I will not take their side. Quite the contrary.
Moslems cannot be our allies against Liberalism because this is a conflict within the Western world, fought within a Western paradigm. It's not their fight, and they dont care. It's an inter-Western civil war and they are taking advantage of our divisions for their own evil ends.
Concerning the admiral qualities of Moslem morality and religious outlook, etc., remember that the devil comes in many guises, and he will sometimes dress his evil under a veil of morality, or a burka, as the case must be.
Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Exactly how I feel.
I should add to Mr. Wilson's statement that a Pakistani, with whom I was in regular acquaintance, was angry about a particular Dutch person and was accusing him of an anti-Muslim Christian agenda. I reminded him that the specific person was an atheist, but he would have none of it, and said that he was a Christian, just like his kinsmen and his ancestors. Even an atheist European's mistake is to carry blood of Christians from his past!
Sometimes, he does the same with me, by accusing an Oraon tribal of being a Hindoo. Oh well...
Nice anecdote.
It should be noted that the vast majority of American "Christians" and "conservatives" are totally clueless about the reality and depth of this conflict. That said, I wouldn't say they are totally useless in the fight: the simple have always been among us and they are precious in Our Lord's eyes (did He not say "the last shall be first"??) But for those with authentically Christian instincts and sensibility, their energies can be properly channeled given the right leadership: if the blind lead the blind, after all, both will fall into a ditch.
THEREFORE... we cannot settle for less than elimination of the current political and intellectual establishment, including the so-called "right wing."
But I think we already knew that.
EGYPT COMES APART RIGHT ON SCHEDULE.
What a difference a decade can make. I had to go back and read Pat Buchanan's old articles before the war to make sense of it.. Here are some quotes from the major neo-con players of the Bush administration.
"On July 10, 2002, Perle invited a former aide to Lyndon LaRouche named Laurent Murawiec to address the Defense Policy Board.
“Mubarak is no great shakes,” says Richard Perle of the President of Egypt. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” Asked about the possibility that a war on Iraq—which he predicted would be a “cakewalk”—might upend governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, former UN ambassador Ken Adelman told Joshua Micah Marshall of Washington Monthly, “All the better if you ask me.”
Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability .... we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as “an unworthy American mission, said Michael Ledeen:"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. … [W]e must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol were giddy with excitement at the prospect of Armageddon. The coming war “is going to spread and engulf a number of countries. … It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid. … [I]t is possible that the demise of some ‘moderate’ Arab regimes may be just round the corner.”
America must reconcile herself to an era of “nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy,” Robert Kagan instructs. But this Pax Americana the neocons envision bids fair to usher us into a time of what Harry Elmer Barnes called “permanent war for permanent peace.”
At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘“friends” of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority. Bush must reject the “timorous counsels” of the “incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell,” wrote Podhoretz, and “find the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated” Islamic world.
Wurmser, as a resident scholar at AEI, drafted joint war plans for Israel and the United States “to fatally strike the centers of radicalism in the Middle East. Israel and the United States should … broaden the conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza. That would establish the recognition that fighting either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”
He urged both nations to be on the lookout for a crisis, for as he wrote, “Crises can be opportunities.”
Where are these guys now when the republican party needs them?
Tocqueville's comparison of the FR to Islam sheds much light on the source of Islam'spower to compel such passion in its adherents:
"By seeming to tend rather to the regeneration of the
human race than to the reform of France alone, it roused
passions such as^ the most violent political revolutions had been incapable of awakening. It inspired prose-
lytism, and gave birth to propagandism ; and hence as-
sumed that quasi religious character which so terrified
those who saw it, or, rather, became a sort of new re-
ligion, imperfect, it is true, without God, worship, or
future life, but still able, like Islamism, to cover the
earth with its soldiers, its apostles, andits martyrs."