THE EMBRACE OF DARKNESS

Submitted by PB (United States), Dec 5, 2006 at 18:17

Why not just target the radical imams? Sever the head of the snake, and the snake dies, to paraphrase Colin Powell.

The problem with your recommendation is that most of the 'West' is experiencing an ontological cultural crisis. One can hardly expect a stout promotion of Western values when those very values are under constant attack from within. What is arresting in your timeline of awakened Islamism is that it coincides with the collapse of Imperial Europe.

Europe lost its political identity and confidence on the fields of Flanders. The British aristocracy and French aristocracy were slaughtered in The Great War and concomitant with that was the loss of their respective country's martial spirit. A similar collapse for the Germans had to wait for the outcome of the Second World War. When America assumed the role of caretaker for europe, it ushered in the period of dotage whose full dottering we are all too painfully witnessing. What happened to the French and Germans in the two wars happened to the Democratic party during the Vietnam war.

So, America now, is left with half its population with a foot in the past glories of ebbullient and self confident cultural ambition, its warriors fighting with a certitude of their own eschatology, and the other half which lives in denial of the future in favor of a life to be lived in the present. We are being pulled between the graveyard and the grandstand. This anomie that has paralyzed the West is a consequence of the vitiation of their Biblcal faith, a faith which gave structure and purpose to their cultural lives.

That is the magnificent irony. The West, which successfully threw off the 'impediments' of religion, will now be bowdlerized by a religion, a religion of the desert, whose embrace is the embrace of darkness.

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