MEPE

[HBendor]

A New Dark Age

By Prof . Paul Eidelberg

The term “Western civilization” was very much the creation of American intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century . The term denoted the world outlook that American intellectuals shared with their European counterparts: science and the scientific conquest of nature, democratic freedom and equality, human rights and the rule of law, material abundance and unlimited progress .

And yet, hardly had the term “Western civilization” surfaced than Oswald Spengler wrote his Decline of the West (1918)!

As James Kurth has pointed out in a brilliant essay, “The Real Clash” (1994), the term “Western civilization” signifies a merely geographical direction rather than any cultural essence, in contrast to Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox, Buddhist, Confucian, and Hindu civilization . What most clearly distinguishes Western from other civilizations is that religion is not the core of its ethos, even though most people who live in the West are Christians .

Less than a hundred years after the term “Western civilization” was invented, America ’s academic elites began to reject the term . Indeed, they now reject not only America ’s global power but also American constitutional government, capitalism, and traditional morality . Multiculturalism (along with cultural relativism) has gained ascendancy in academe, in consequence of which the America is no longer a “melting pot” but rather an aggregation of self-assertive and self-justifying racial and ethnic groups such as African Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans . America has entered a post-modern, relativistic world .

Notice, moreover, that multiculturalism coincided with the feminism, an anti-Western movement . Feminists see in the Christian West (as well as in Judaism) male dominance and an emphasis on family values that restricts a woman’s freedom . Notice, too, that the post-World War II change from an industrial to a services economy has moved women form the home to the office, and transformed the nuclear family into the “non-family . ” The ascendancy of multiculturalism and feminism together mark the end of “Western civilization . ”

History seems to have played tricks on mankind . The Enlightenment, a movement that began in eighteenth-century Europe with the separation of church and state, a movement that offered the nation or the nation-state as the object of one’s loyalty, has ended with utter hostility not only to the church but to the nation-state as well . The Enlightenment has thus produced a black hole from which no light can emerge . The nihilism that now dominates Europe, and which has all but conquered America —recall Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind—marks a new Dark Age .

Now it so happens that nihilism underlies American pop culture . This pop culture is spreading throughout the globe as a result of America ’s political and economic hegemony . Devoid of reason and reverence and manifesting man’s basest instincts, American pop culture constitutes the greatest threat to all tradition-based societies or civilizations whose core is religious . This is why Muslims regard America as the “Great Satan”—the great tempter . This is why Israel , which behaves like a vassal of the United States , is deemed the “Small Satan . ”

Israel ’s intellectual and political elites appear oblivious of the irreconcilable clash between the “West” and the “Rest,” in particular Islam . Influenced by their American counterparts, they believe in “conflict resolution” and have established departments in universities for the purpose . Oslo is one manifestation of this obscurantism . It were as if the conflict between the U . S . and Nazi Germany—hardly to be compared to the civilizational conflict between Israel and Islam—could have been resolved by peaceful means . If Germany is peaceful today, it’s not only because it was conquered in war, but because the desire to conquer others was bombed out of the German people .

Israel ’s ruling elites refuse to take Islam (to say nothing of Judaism) seriously . Their mentality is post-modern, permeated by cultural relativism and an effete humanism . They have conditioned themselves into believing that peaceful coexistence is possible between Jews and Palestinian Arabs . (How else can these assimilated Jews appear “acceptable”?) Never mind that these Arabs are part of a 1,400 year-old civilization that despises and hates infidels, especially Jews . Never mind that Muslims have been slaughtering Jews and Christians and even each other down through the centuries . Never mind that Arab children have been taught to hate Jews and to emulate suicide bombers . Israel ’s Illuminati dwell in Darkness .
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JUDEA & SAMARIA are clear and unquestionably JEWISH!

MiddleEast Political Expressions