JOLLY DAYS

Fighting Symptoms

At the Language Log the writer considers Islamo-Fascism:

“Fascism” is not a bad term to pick for the kind of nightmare that would probably result if a global Islamic caliphate were to be established by the sort of Waziristan cave denizens who issue taped messages encouraging disaffected young Pakistanis in Britain to go out and blow themselves and a few hundred passengers to pieces on a train or a plane to glorify Allah. (Yes, I despise this corrupt cult of mass slaughter and theocratic bigotry. Did you think I would be all latte-sipping gooey-relativist about it?)

David Brooks gives up in this piece. He feels that the toxicity in many cultures (noted many times in this weblog) is not remediable by outside forces. Deriving some of his reasoning from a foreign aid worker named Lawrence Harrison, who wrote a book, Brooks writes:

… Moynihan’s greatest observations: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

… cultural change can’t be imposed from the outside, except in rare circumstances. It has to be led by people who recognize and accept responsibility for their own culture’s problems and selectively reinterpret their own traditions to encourage modernization…cultural change is measured in centuries, not decades, and … cultures are separated from one another by veils of complexity and difference…. it is also foolish to think we can address the root causes of their toxic desires. We’ll just have to fight the symptoms of a disease we can neither cure nor understand.

Dark times we live in. Hezbollah applauded by the Lebanese who were used as shields by a terrorist gang. That very self-same gang sanctified by the UN as equal to a nation whose borders were violated, its citizens kidnapped. Iran and Syria claiming victory by supporting terror. Israel questioning itself and Iraq falling apart. Bring on the clowns…