My late father, who was a professor of literature, used to say that the self-confidence of the West had been shattered by the revelation of Nazi war crimes. I think he had a good point. That was the genesis, all this multi-culti self-loathing is but the aftermath.
Europeans loathed themselves long before Hitler. Self loathing is an essential element of the Romantic European self image, see, e.g., Rilke, Nietzsche, Strindberg, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Henry James's "The Golden Bowl", with its vicious comparison between American cupidity and European cupidity.
I believe that fascism is a predictable (not to say forgivable or acceptable) reaction to democracy, which must be overcome in order to achieve true democracy.
To use the Hegelian dialectic, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
In English history, one might look to the excesses of Cromwell and the Roundheads, contemporaneously with the Levellers, a subcategory of them, who seemingly failed until their ideas were reborn again in the Whig Party, which increased the franchise and eventually banned slavery.
In American history, I would point to the excesses of Jackson's presidency, including the maltreatment of Amerindians. The beneficiaries of Jacksonian Democracy included Abraham Lincoln, a poor farm boy, the child of illiterates.
I don't mean to argue that Hitler was anything like Cromwell or Andrew Jackson, only that their followers had similar motivations, a fear of the unknown and a desire for stability.
I don't think that is what is happening in the Netherlands with the oppression of Hirsi Ali. Would that it were.
It goes far, far beyond fear of the unknown and the desire for stability. It goes to a sort of oppression of individuality that hasn't been seen in the Western World, ever. Not ever.
Not even Hitler. For example, the German wives of men whose ancestry was remotely Jewish -- one Jewish grandparent, parents themselves non-observant -- were able to save their husbands from the Holocaust by appealing to Hitler's love of "German blood".
No matter how critical I am of Islam's oppression of individual thought, no criticism I can level compares with the ramifications of the hostile interrogation I got from Sun Tzu last week, demanding that I justify my belief in a religion whose book is admitted to have human error.
The inescapable corollary of that interrogation is the premise that only books without human error are worthy of belief, and, of course, that his book has no human error.
And if Islam has no human error, no dissent is, ipso facto, tolerable. |
