The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.
Note: This is an update to Fjordman’s post from yesterday, “Sharia-Supporters and Transvestites of the World Unite!”
One of the bloggers who read this essay stated that “Stuff like this makes me think the f***ing Jihadis ought to just destroy our culture.” OK, but what if that was the intention? I know there is some debate about just how influential radical Leftism and cultural Marxism are in weakening the West. Many observers believe this weakness is mainly caused by a general Western loss of self-confidence, an idea — widely shared even by many so-called right-wingers — that non-discrimination in all walks of life is not just the highest, but the only virtue, and finally, Western guilt for slavery, colonialism, global warming, declining numbers of rhinos — well, just about anything, really. And I sometimes agree with that.
However, when looking at examples such as this, we really have to ask whether cultural Marxism is the prime mover behind this after all. I have seen Socialists in several countries show great respect for Muslims and their culture, on occasion even praising them for their “family values” (What would those be? Honor killings?). Yet these are the very same Socialists who have spent generations systematically dismantling the nuclear family and the traditional culture in their own countries, and smashing their Judeo-Christian religious base in particular. After spending decades destroying our values, they now proceed to import alien cultures to “restore” what they have themselves destroyed. This trend is so powerful that we have to ask whether this is an intentional policy.
British or French commentators tend to talk about a “post-colonial guilt complex” when describing what’s wrong with their countries. Here is a quote by French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, taken from an interview in the Danish newspaper Politiken:
Those Frenchmen who hate France say they hate the criminal French past, and they don’t think we should remain a nation in this modern, democratic world. They want to dissolve the nation state. They do not hate themselves, but are very proud of hating the past, because they feel strongly superior to their ancestors. They are not biased or prejudiced, they are willing to relinquish their roots in favor of universal values. I have never cared for the idea of self-loathing. I see far more arrogance and self-glorification in their intense criticism than self-loathing.
I disagree with Finkielkraut here. They do not necessarily hate themselves, personally, but they do hate their own culture and history, and want to cooperate with Islam in destroying the West, the most inventive culture in history. Finkielkraut again:
Radical democracy is the idea that everything has to be “democratic,” that all differences and any form of hierarchy or separation is undemocratic. For instance, they don’t think we should make a difference between citizens and outsiders. To a radical democrat, there is no such thing as an “outsider.” That’s why they are fighting for a regulation of the laws to ensure free access for all immigrants. All immigrants are welcome. If you say that it’s not possible to let everybody in, you get branded a racist. The radical democrats are a small group, but they wield a lot of influence because they can intimidate people. They function as a radical superego all over Europe, and in my country in particular.
Again, this cannot be entirely explained by past colonial history. Sweden (as well as Norway) doesn’t have a colonial history, yet still shares many of these problems. What does Sweden have? Well, an abundance of Socialism and radical Feminism.
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Artists Thyra Hilden and Pio Diaz projected video images of flames onto 1,000 square-metre glass screens in a museum in the central Danish town of Aarhus. The “art” exhibition was called “City on Fire – Burning the roots of Western culture.” The artists assured us that “It is not actual fire that destroys actual buildings – but the idea of fire that destroys the historical and ideological roots of Western culture.” Part of their vision was “to create an aesthetic image of the deconstruction of the cultural roots of the Western world,” because as they said, Western culture was “very aggressive,” while Islamic culture has been far less so. What these “artists” don’t seem to understand, or maybe don’t care about, is that while they may “only” burn Western culture figuratively, the Muslims they are cooperating with may well burn thousands of years of Western cultural achievements quite literally, judging from past historical records elsewhere..
Some Western Socialists just can’t wait that long. Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen, a Marxist with a history of hostility towards Christianity, caused a stir by burning pages from the Bible in public. This happened only a few weeks after a Muslim mob set the Norwegian embassy in Syria ablaze because of the Muhammad cartoons. Mr. Jespersen was challenged by some Christians to burn pages of the Koran as well, but he declined to do so. He is also known for having burnt an American flag on national TV. A British schoolgirl has been barred from wearing a crucifix necklace in class in Gillingham, England, on the grounds that it breached health and safety rules. Muslim pupils, however, could wear religious symbols. Why this hatred for Christianity (and Judaism) specifically? Well, if you want to destroy the West, starting with its Judeo-Christian foundations might be a good idea. Since God, according to the Bible, created the world in successive steps, the anti-Western Multiculturalists can presumably uncreate Western man in several steps by attacking his culture, his memory, his self-confidence and above all, his religion: A Multicultural Anti-Genesis:
The Multiculturalist uncreated mankind in his own image: Confused, self-loathing individuals with no concept of right or wrong. And he didn’t create them male of female. He said that they were identical, and that claiming otherwise was sexist. And the Multiculturalist cursed them and said, “Be barren and decrease in numbers, vanish from the face of the earth, let Mother Nature rule and the fish of the sea and the birds of the air reclaim the world.”
The Multiculturalist then said, “Let here be darkness,” and there was darkness. The Multiculturalist saw that the darkness was good, and he unseparated the darkness from the light. The Multiculturalist called the light “discrimination and bigotry,” and the darkness he called “tolerance.” On the seventh day, the Multiculturalist rested, and he saw that it was good. He had unmade reason, he had unmade logic, he had unmade truth, he had unmade the very reason and desire to exist. And there was evening on the seventh day, but there was no new morning.
I clicked the link about the British schoolgirl, and according to several comments, the problem is not that she was wearing a Crucifix, but rather that any type of hanging jewelry is not allowed.
They’re afraid that she would strangle herself while doing a Darryl Dawkins slam dunk on the school basketball court.
Cuz I’m sure that’s a huge problem among British schoolgirls.
The school is just playing CYA. If the girl got hurt because of her jewelry, they might get sued. Which is a legitimate concern, but only if she’s not bright enough to take it off during sports activities.
I hate this kind of nanny-state “protect our children from any conceivable risk at all costs” action.
Here’s an example of what happens when stupidity and nanny-statism intersect. (I really do encourage checking out the link- not related to Islamophobia, just incredible stupidity)
http://www.sunherald.com/306/story/61308.html
The glorification of any culture other than your own (regardless of the facts of each), is a recent pathology.
The otherculture, in these circumstances, is always a mostly blank sheet upon which those, who have learned to loath their own culture, can project their “perfect world” wishes.
The ancient ideal of a Garden of Eden place, or a Utopia, is unconsciously injected into the sanitized vision of the other people/culture. They become- in a wish fulfillment fantasy- the “good”. And embody what the self-loathing people know that they, and their own culture, are not.
It is primarily a combination of a self-negating and negatively warped “education”, about their own culture, and a delusional idealization of the unknown.
The Noble Savage, writ on a global scale.
As if the (untainted-by-corrupting-Civilization) “savages” did not murder, rape, pillage, plunder and fight endless wars …just like every other human tribe and nation on Earth.
In essence, the comforting hatred of one’s own nearby culture, and the absolution of all guilt -and even of every “base” human instinct- from the distant culture, is a failure of critical judgment.
The skeptical intelligence has clearly not been developed in the schools of these Western countries if their students- and eventual leaders- come up with this suicidially-immature and philosophically-juvenile conclusion: we are bad; the other is good.
Mistaking a splinter in their own eye for a beam, and the entire lumberyard in the other’s eye for a tiny toothpick.
Unless education can teach some fundmental reasoning skills (epistemology, lite) , and some comparative history (“What is the Muslim’s version of their own expansionistic ‘Crusading’, from 650 A.D. onward, called?“), quick, the battle may have already been lost to this self-loathing scholastic seppuku.
Those who cannot judge honestly will be judged wanting.
Profitsbeard,
I don’t know whose post I like more, yours or Fjordman’s. Thanks to both of you. We will fight the good fight, as will my children.
gun-totin-wacko – I followed you down the rabbit hole for that link. All I can say is WOW! Dang it, that is STUPID! The drunk idiot had no responsibility for his own actions?
Profitsbeard – Great post also.
The whole picture we see of the self loathing Transnational Progressives, Cultural Marxists, what ever you want to call the idiots is really discouraging. Like the al Goreacle Envirowackos who worship ‘nature’ and have never been in nature. The natural world is ruled by fang, tooth, claw. Eat or be eaten. Die at 40 or sooner or in chilbirth for the female. I think that is really a yearning for the mythical Garden of Eden which they then deconstruct because it is a myth. A yearning for someone to take care of their poor helpless souls, but they cannot help themsleves. They believe in nothing and want to leave the rest of us with that nothing.
Sad…
charles martel–
Fjordman is always a good stimulant.
(A fine read on this theme is Arthur Koestler’s collected “Bricks From Babel”… he knew this corrupting fallacy already in the 1930’s, when the “treason of the intellectuals“, for the first time, was helping NOT oppose the rise of the Nazis and Communists.)
robohobo–
Nature is only pleasant and peaceful in Disney dreams.
She’s a protean and brutal Kali as well as a nurturing and ethereal Mother Gaia.
But you don’t get one without the other.
On the question of the “guilt complex”…more than 50 years ago, C S Lewis had some thoughts on this, which are basically aligned with those of Finkielkraut. Excerpted here: Repent Now.