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Wednesday, March 01, 2006Hitchens hits the nail quite squarely on the head in his latest.But my favorite bit is this: I have my own criticisms both of my one-time Trotskyist comrades and of my temporary neocon allies, but it can be said of the former that they saw Hitlerism and Stalinism coming—and also saw that the two foes would one day fuse together—and so did what they could to sound the alarm. And it can be said of the latter (which, alas, it can't be said of the former) that they looked at Milosevic and Saddam and the Taliban and realized that they would have to be confronted sooner rather than later. [my italics]What has a neocon from the Reagan tradition reading and nodding along with Hitchens? Quite simply this - while we have very different ideas about this civilization of ours, we both agree that it is worth defending and saving. In this particular moment, the great political divide on the issue that matters most is no longer a matter of right and left as traditionally understood, but between those - left and right - who have lost their belief in the West and are preparing for surrender, and those - left and right - who view the West as the a positive force for freedom and law that must and will be preserved. I think the cartoon wars have been particularly useful for better understanding this divide: While one can disagree about Iraq, about strategy in the War on Terror and more, the cartoon question presents a very stark choice: If you agree that in some way the publication of cartoons in Denmark gives license for the burning of embassies and the massacre of Christians in Nigeria, you have agreed that the West is either incapable of or unworthy of existing except as a peculiar subset of the Islamist sphere - allowed its decadence but within firmly policed limits. The opposing camp, of which I am a member, recognizes that the value of the West lies in its openness to free inquiry in which ideas must win out on their own merits in the end, not on the political strength of their advocates. In this regard, the supreme Enlightenment value was not the squishy modern "tolerance," but a toleration for free inquiry. When Voltaire cried, "Ecrasez l'infâme!" it was not because the Catholic Church was insufficiently Muslim. When Diderot and his compadres undertook the Encyclopédie, it was not because of their displeasure at not being censored by imams but rather by the Pope. In the end, the West will win out, for its spirit of free inquiry, however much under wraps in officialdom, persists abroad in the land and will give us the tools to stand as surely in the end against the 14th century Islamonutters of today as it did against the fascists and totalitarians of the 20th century. 
posted by gbarto at 9:44 AM |
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Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
