Friday, March 28, 2014

One minus one.

http://preview.cutcaster.com/cutcaster-photo-100813533-3D-Red-Number-0.jpg
About Western students of themselves—including not only literal students in schools and university, but also the vast minions of consumers of pop culture (even edging up to middle-brow and higher culture)—an astute Jihad Watcher put the rich and complex phenomenon succinctly.  His succinct observation was in response to the suggestion of another commenter who, in response to a Jihad Watch report of a high school in Michigan that was compelling its non-Muslim students to wear Islamic garb in order to derive multiculturalist benefits from this show and experience of vicarious "respect", wrote:

Students... should then be forced to wear garments associated with the Jewish, Catholic, Buddist, Mormon, and Protestant faiths

The aforementioned commenter then offered his succinct observation:

They do learn about those faiths in literature classes. They read “The Crucible” and “The Scarlet Letter” and learn about how intolerant protestantism is. They read “Chansons de Roland” and learn about the evils of the Crusades. They read “Candide” and learn about the evils of the Spanish Inquisition. But when they read about Islam, they only learn that jihad is a peaceful inner struggle.

This then prompted me to unfold a further thought on this:

Alas, the Syllabus of Errors of the PC MC West, in its pedagogy of a historical Gallery of Shame and White Guilt, often resembles more propaganda than the noble ideal of Paideia.  It contains many more books by which to reinforce the twin memes of its paradigm of reverse racism (irrationally excessive self-criticism and irrationally excessive admiration of the Other)—a veritable library full; supplemented by countless television shows, movies, and plays over the decades.

How many books do we suppose the Muslim world has produced which are as profoundly self-critical of their own society and their own culture—which is to say, synecdochically, of their own Islam—as the West has produced in its own scathingly searching and morbidly corrosive self-criticism?

I believe the number to answer that rhetorical question was (allegedly) invented by the Arabs: al-zifr. Translation: zero, zilch, zots.

This highlights one of the most peculiar, and infuriating, aspects of the World War we are currently in (aside from the monumental fact that one side—namely us—doesn't yet realize it's at war): it is an asymmetrical war, in many senses, including this one:

They hate us and are incapable of self-criticism; while we, through our culture of an industrious and multifarious cultivation of a morbid self-criticism of our own culture, hate ourselves. 

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