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OUR UNCONFIDENT CIVILIZATION |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Tuesday, 05 January 2010 |
[Letter to the Wall
Street Journal]
This is in response to "Our
Incompetent Civilization" by Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens.
Mr. Stephens ascribes failures to profile Moslems at airport
security, think rationally about climate change, or eliminate Somali pirates to
"civilizational incompetence." Such
failures are not due to a lack of ability but to a lack of will. It is not civilizational competence that we
lack but civilizational confidence.
On the same day as Mr. Stephens' article (01/04/10), Der Spiegel ran an
editorial bemoaning the lack of Western outrage at recent Moslem attacks on
Danish cartoonists who caricatured Mohammed.
It was entitled, "The
West Is Choked by Fear." But fear of
what?
Whatever that fear is of, it is the cause of our collapse of
civilizational confidence. Please allow
me to identify it. It is the fear of
envy.
All three of the
great barbarisms of modern times have been pathologies of envy. Nazism,
preaching race-envy toward "rich exploitative Jews"; Communism preaching
class-envy toward "rich exploitative capitalists"; Moslem Terrorism preaching
culture-envy toward "rich exploitative America/the West."
And just as it is
envy which makes a Nazi, Communist, or Moslem Terrorist, it is the fear of
being envied which makes a Liberal.
It is the liberal fear of being envied that causes our
culture to be apologetic, masochistic, and self-emasculating. Capitulation to the fear of being envied is
the defining characteristic of liberals - it is what makes them liberals. Liberalism is the dominant intellectual
perspective of our academia, media, and government - yet it is not a political
philosophy. It is a psychological
strategy to avoid being envied, the politicalization of envy-appeasement.
The fear of being envied is the source of the liberal
compulsion to apologize to the envious for the existence of America
and Western Civilization, to focus on their flaws not their virtues.
The fear of being envied is why all liberal passions are
frenzies of masochism -e.g., opponents of missile defense do not want their
country defended, advocates of global warmism do not want their civilization to
prosper, proponents of multi-culti political correctness do want their culture
to survive.
If we wish to regain civilizational confidence, we need to
embrace just two words: Reject envy. Envy has no power over those who have no fear
of it. The wisest of the 10 Commandments
is the last: Thou shall not covet. Yet it needs a corollary: Thou shall not fear those who covet.
No nation in history has more to be proud of and less to
apologize for than America. Recognition of this fact will enable us to
defend our country from the envious hate of those who wish it destroyed.
Ps: Note that I
continue to spell "Moslem" the traditional way for centuries until it recently
became politically incorrect to do so.
For some inexplicable reason, it now must be spelled "Muslim." One small way to start rejecting envy would
be to revert to traditional spelling - for after all, as Arabic is written
without vowels, the most accurate transliteration from the Arabic would be
"Mslm."
Jack Wheeler
Editor, To The Point, www.tothepointnews.com
611 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite
429
Washington DC
20003
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