Sunday, November 06, 2005
EURABIAN INTIFADA
The very good blog No Pasaran that covers French politics and media, has a piece about how US media is covering the violence in France. The point? That the conceptual tools available to the mainstream media in the West are simply inadequate to express what is happening. The universal mainstream spin that this is about "race and poverty" simply doesn't work. It's about culture and religion, but the post-modernist cultural relativist assumptions upon which the mainstream media's editorial world-view is based can't accommodate this. They can't see what's happening in terms of the real causes and they can't make judgments about the events except in terms they've adopted over the last 40 years of steady corrosion of their moral compass.
LATER .... As the day goes on, I'm continuing to think about what's happening in France and elsewhere in Europe. Whether it's now with these riots or not too long from now when some other crisis comes, Europe will have to come to terms with the real cultural issues here. Will Europe maintain some semblence of meaningful continuity with the liberal Enlightenment, or not? If so, these societies will have to draw clear lines that Muslims in Europe will have to decide to cross or not. Will you accept women as social, political and legal equals or not? Will you accept that Islam must coexist peacefully with other religious and cultural values or not? Will you accept that the public sphere is one that is secular or not? If European governments and social institutions don't define these kinds of clear-cut criteria for membership in their societies, Europe is indeed doomed.
Today, I am not hopeful. Europe has been culturally castrated by 50 years of socialism and denial of its best cultural heritage. The change in mentality and values that would have to happen to give Europe a backbone would be so great that major political and social upheavals would be required. The cultural and political elites of Europe would have toadmit that they have been treading a path to self-destruction for at least five decades. This isn't very likely.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:42 AM
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