Jeeeez. You can be assured the whole process was “ominous” any way you look at it to the side that was getting wiped out!!!
Leave out Hegel and I am confident the Arab-Islamists were saying exactly that.
The Greeks were notorious for considering all non-Greeks to be barbarians, with even the Macedonians barely making the grade as Greeks. They were philosophically and emotionally attached to notions of radical racial and cultural superiority, and those attachments were undoubtedly on their minds in every encounter with non-Greeks, especially in a clash which threatened the independence of their civilization.
I would not be surprised if every Greek general said that in every pre-battle speech where non-Greeks were involved. I am sure numerous others, say for example the WWII Japanese and their Western opponents said the same thing.
Despite 24 replies to this thread I seem to have overlooked several, entirely or partly.
(reply #76)
Sorry, I said something irrelevant. Ask that Martian guy to give you a point for catching it.
It makes a difference in the Babylonian and Egyptian cases in that not only peoples but also civilizations were clashing.
(reply #80)
My usage was entirely proper- “Interlude” means “intervening period of time”.
There was an interruption in the Clash of Civilizations because the civilizations ruled by the diadochi were not clearly distinct as civilizations from their rivals to the west. The Ptolemys are the best known example. They were atop a Greek ruling class, and the country was partially Hellenized- Alexandria was I think the largest Greek city ever up until its time.
(from reply #90)
Suppose I said: “Alas for the Japanese their Pearl Harbor attack led to their undoing, and their chance of Asian hegemony was gone.”
By your logic that would be exactly the same as mourning the thwarted hegemony of the Japanese “race”. It does no such thing.
(reply #98)
I read TGG in high school about 48 years ago. I remember nothing about it.
Lest you think I was an English Lit dullard let me tell you I got a 4 in the AP English Lit national test in 1967 even though my HS hadn’t let me into its AP section (which included a later English Lit PhD and an Engineering PhD). To this day I revel at the memory of having scored higher than several AP section intellectuals (who, to be fair, all had deservedly much higher overall class ranks than me). I recall that my senior year Lit teacher liked Fitzgerald better than Hemingway, while I liked Hemingway and thought TGG was a real bore. Maybe I am now sufficiently cultured to appreciate it, and should try again. Despite our differing taste the teacher was good enough to encourage me to take the AP test that year.
Now to meet your insinuation head-on: it should be considered racist to deny it would matter if any racial group was submerged in its native land to levels significantly different from present. That is happening slow-motion in Europe due to high immigration rates combined with native birthrates barely at to possibly well below replacement. “Eurabia” will not occur in the next 50 years. However, and we need an objective professional to provide exact numbers, if present trends continue it will occur eventually, possibly within 100 years. A considerable Western faction is indifferent to European submergence, but would scream bloody murder at the thought of a role reversal in which Europeans emigrated to any part of the non-European world and eventually obtained numerical dominance. That is hypocrisy, and it would be well to do away with it, and for my part I affirm I wish present race ratios to remain the same.
My main problem, though, lies with the religion of most of the European newcomers, a religion to which they bear intransigent attachment. BrainGlutton does not like this fool religion any better than I do. How he can be so indifferent to the challenge it poses to our Western Civilization through demographic increase baffles me.
I think we all agree that actual terrorists are a very small subset of the Islamic population. What we don’t talk about, however, is the large amount of intolerance against western values that exists in Islam itself, and in large majorities of Islamic populations, even in the ‘modern’ Islamic countries. I don’t understand why liberals carry water for this, as Islam is far more opposed to their values than those of the religious right.
Under Sharia law, homosexuality is a crime. Apostasy and blasphemy are crimes. If Andres Serrano had created ‘Piss Mohammed’ instead of ‘Piss Christ’, he would either have been killed or forced into hiding. This is not a problem coming only from the extremist/terrorist population - it’s baked into the religion itself. Hell, after Cat Stevens converted and became Yousef Islam, he supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, for heaven’s sake. He thought that his slander of the religion should result in his execution, because that’s part of the religion.
“If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.” - Mohammed
These are not the views of a very small number of Muslims, or only of Muslims in backwards countries. In 2009, a Gallup Poll of 500 Muslims in Britain failed to find a* single one* who thought that homosexuality was morally defensible. Only 3% said that pre-marital sex was moral.
These are also not extreme positions borne of being disadvantaged, poor, or downtrodden. They are held by Muslims from all income strata and in western, developed countries as well.
A comprehensive 2013 Pew survey of Muslim attitudes around the world found that the vast majority of Muslims around the world believe that Sharia Law is the revealed word of God.
Even in the ‘moderate’ Islamic countries like Malaysia and Jordan, large majorities believe that Sharia should be the law of the land.
From the cite:
They are also the most anti-abortion people on the planet. The highest level of support for abortion of all the countries polled was 18% in Bangladesh. In almost all other countries support for abortion rights was in single digits, and in many of them it was so low as to be statistical noise.
The highest level of support for Homosexual rights was in Uganda of all places, where a whopping 12% were willing to say that it was not morally wrong. Furthermore, the more ‘advanced’ a Muslim country was, the LESS support for Homosexuality there was. Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia,
Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon - in all these countries, opposition to homosexuality was universal within the margin of error, with no support greater than 2% recorded.
Even more frightening is the support for honor killings - especially when the woman in the relationship is the transgressor. For example, in Malaysia 41% of the public thinks that honor killings against women are justified. In the middle east, the majority of the population believes that honor killings are justified in some cases.
Now let’s look at the treatment of women: It’s pathetic. Vast majorities of Muslims in most countries say that a woman must always obey her husband. The lowest support for this in the middle east is in Jordan, where ‘only’ 74% of all Muslims think that women should be forced to obey their husbands.
Islam is also a Proselytizing faith: Overwhelming majorities believe that it is a Muslim’s duty to convert other people to Islam.
If you’re expecting the Muslim refugee population to assimilate and adopt western values, the Pew survey suggests one reason why that’s not happening in other countries; even in countries with large non-muslim populations, the vast majority of Muslims say that their closest friends are also Muslims. Non-Muslims make up nearly 40% of the population in Lebanon, yet 94% of Muslims describe their circle of close friends as exclusively or mostly Muslim.
They also don’t assimilate through marriage, as large majorities of Muslims everywhere say that they are not comfortable with their children marrying non-Muslims.
So one consequence of bringing large numbers of refugees into the country is that you can expect that every community where the refugees are settled will grow in opposition to abortion rights, gay rights, women’s rights, etc. You can see this happening to a larger degree in Europe, with their larger percentages of Muslim immigrants. Those societies are growing more intolerant, more violent, and more closed. Support for free speech is collapsing, Jews are being persecuted, and rape and violence against women is increasing, with the highest increases in the areas containing the most Muslim immigrants. In 2014, Sweden had an annual increase of 11% in rapes, with the large majority of them being perpetrated by immigrants.
That’s an 8-fold increase in rapes per capita! The trend across Europe in recent years has been an increase in ‘gang’ rapes, generally carried out by groups of Arab-Muslim young men.
I think this is a problem worth discussing, and is largely derailed by the typical hand-waving about how ‘peaceful’ Islam is and how extremists make up only a small part of the population. From the perspective of the Western left who thinks that conservative Christians are extremists, almost ALL the refugees would be considered ‘extremist’, as even moderate Muslims tend to be more stridently opposed to gay rights and abortions than are moderate Christians.
This is an excellent point, and one which I don’t see being given anywhere near enough attention. The fact of the matter is that social attitudes among refugees from Syria are alarmingly retrograde. Prior to the war, homosexuality was illegal in Syria and women were second class citizens, although it would be remiss not to point out that women in Syria had more rights than women in other Arab states.
Ideas do not recognise boundaries. People from sexist and homophobic societies bring their sexism and homophobia with them. This isn’t necessarily a problem. If immigration is well managed and carefully controlled, people with less egalitarian views can be more successfully integrated. The immigration we’re seeing in Europe at the moment is neither well managed or carefully controlled. It’s an unmitigated shambles.
Mass immigration facilitates self-segregation. It doesn’t necessarily lead to it for all migrants, but it makes it easier on aggregate. Migrants finding themselves cloistered in communities with others who share the same backward religious views on the rights of women and gays will be subject to far less social pressure to abandon those views. This should be of great concern to anyone who wants to preserve the hard-won civil rights of women and sexual minorities.
The same is true of Christianity and Judaism. So what?
You continue to make the capital error of judging an entire system of faith by the beliefs of small numbers of its members. (You say “large majorities,” but that has already been well demonstrated to be incorrect.)
The Judeo-Christian world is the one in which gay marriage is being legalized.
What a moronic equivalence of desperation. Stunning that liberals will delude themselves to apologize for beliefs that run counter to the entire Western liberal tradition.
And as regards migrants from those places where this is true, I imagine Sam and I would have the same concerns. I’m English, and I wouldn’t want Britain to take a massive influx of refugees from Christian Uganda, or from Russia for that very reason. Muslim refugees from Kosovo or Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the other hand, would be far more welcome.
This isn’t true. A poll run by the Pew Research Organisation found that:
“Muslims around the world overwhelmingly view certain behaviours – including prostitution, homosexuality, suicide, abortion, euthanasia and consumption of alcohol – as immoral. But attitudes toward polygamy, divorce and birth control are more varied. For example, polygamy is seen as morally acceptable by just 4% of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Azerbaijan; about half of Muslims in the Palestinian territories (48%) and Malaysia (49%); and the vast majority of Muslims in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Senegal (86%) and Niger (87%).”
That situation is so obviously fucked from every direction that I doubt even the neocons have any imperial hard-on for it. Intervention is simply something that everybody increasingly agrees needs to be done, but there’ll be no big money for contractors in Syria, nobody knows what to do there after ISIS is defeated, and eventually we’re going to bump heads with the Russians over whether Assad stays or goes.
None of which makes such intervention any “Clash of Civilizations” scenario.
I hate to be nitpicky, but viewing something as immoral is not quite the same as being intolerant of it. There are a lot of things I consider to be sins that I would not try to ban by law. (We did that with alcohol, and it didn’t work out too well.)
The same is not true of the governments of countries with Judeo-Christian majorities. I tried to make this point in post #62 but it got ignored. Take a good look at the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. Its a joke, it basically says “human rights are always subservient to sharia law”. This declaration has been signed by the governments of 45 majority muslim countries including “secular” Turkey. I summarised the most offensive parts of this declaration in post #62 but the worst is that it makes clear it should be a crime for a muslim to change to another religion or become an atheist and the punishment for doing so should be set by sharia law.
Personally I find that system of values repugnant. There is a strong case to be made that the system of values of Islamic majority countries as self declared by the 45 countries that have signed the CDHRI is incompatible with western values. No Christian majority country has legal punishments for changing to another religion.
You can’t separate the two, the concept of separation of church and state is anathema in Islam. Islamic tenets decree that governments of muslim countries must follow sharia law. The values espoused in the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, are fundamentally Islamic values.
“that situation”. You didn’t just rant about Republicans wanting to wage war you started a thread on it when that is exactly what is going on now. Obama has attacked a number of nations fighting a number of different groups who all have a common denominator. That denominator would be Islamic terrorism.
You left out one small detail. The only way such a declaration could be acknowledged by 45 countries is that it has the support of it’s population. When people claim Islam is peaceful around the world that statement ignores the fact that 70% of those Muslims live in Muslim-majority countries where such laws are practiced and supported.
But you’re the ones making the complaints, not Islam.
We, in the west, do not believe that religion and state are inseparable, and we’re the ones, in this thread, making judgements.
Some Christians say that the “Law of God is higher than the Law of Man.” But very few of us believe that, or that the state is beholden to the Church and the Bible. Even if a majority of Christians stated that, it wouldn’t make it true.
Thats the point I’m trying to make. Self declared ‘islamic values’ as supported by the majority of people and the governments of muslim countries are in direct conflict with western values of equality of men/women, separation of church and state, religious freedom and acceptance of sexual minorities.
You can’t point to Christian majority countries and say we have just as bad things in our holy books, because no christian majority countries currently have a biblical based set of laws equivalent to sharia law, while 45 muslim countries have signed a declaration saying sharia is always more important that human rights.