No contest

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Mar 3, 2007 at 14:30

Dear Plato, you wrote :

> I have no pretensions to be a historian and as you say, one little detail can undo a beautiful theory.

This is a universal rule , applicable to all theories.

> Have I propounded any theory here?

Any general statement is sort of a theory or rather and more formally a thesis, if I am not wrong.

> And I agree with your observation that the Nazism analogy can be tiresome, but since since it happened so recently it is bound to come up again and again.

Thanks.

The problem is not that Nazism happened so recently but that general historical consciousness (= historical memory ) of the public is so limited that it is useless to appeal to more distant historical realities. No one will appreciate , let alone understand it. :(

And of course nazism has been vastly (ab)used by today's dominant pop culture and that's why it has become such a common place now. (A sombre side effect of America's cultural supremacy in the world).

> My problem has nothng to do with your description of the nature of the Turks under Ataturk. My contention is that by bracketing Ataturk's atrocities with Muslim atrocities will bring up the Nazi ones.

Personally I think that Nazism is a dead ideology. It failed compeletely and ruined and killed not only those who were allegedly its enemies (Jews ) , but first and foremost those who pinned all their hopes and lives onto it. Will you resurrect your killer if you could ?

The Jews are threatened today by Moslems , not by Nazis who either are too few and isolated or too weak and hated (and rightly so) to pose any real threat. But sure , it's an all too convenient and obvious scarecrow to frighten the uncritical electorate with. With our historical experience no one can seriously admit he is a Nazi. I have never seen anyone in his senses saying „I am a Nazi". I have seen only altercations and mutual accusations and curses „He's a Nazi" „He's a d… fascist" etc. applied always to third persons. But what does it mean ? In my opinion that i. al. low pop culture is thriving at the expense of common sense and decency ( two things pop culture definitely doesn't promote.) Nazism is a marginal phenomenon . Islam is a central mass phenomenon and is by far more dangerous and lethal than Nazism ever was. NSDAP had never had 1,5 bln members.

> He may have considered himself a good Muslim but in the larger Islamic world he is seem as someone who took Turkey out of the Islamic world.

May I tell you an anecdote from Kemal Pasha's struggle against the caliph ? One day an officer asked an Anatolian peasant soldier after saying the caliph had been deposed : „What do you think? Who is Mustafa Kemal now ?" „He is our new caliph".

Until his time Turkey was grudgingly a mulicultural and multi-ethnic society. Mustafa Kemal made it a Moslem monoculture. I wonder if the larger Islamic world is so stupid or if it believes all are so stupid as not to see this obvious fact which invalidates all efforts at ‘secularisation' à la Turque.

The Turks had been fanatic Moslems for one thousand years. How can you believe they could suddenly within a few years be "secularized" per decretum ? Such things simply don't happen. Changing a fez for a cylinder hat out of fear of losing one's head doesn't make a Moslem a secularist.

> You may remember that Musharaf of Pakistan on taking power said he wanted to do an Ataturk and had to hastily backtrack on the hostile reaction generated. If you look at every Muslim dictator's action as an Islamic problem then in Muslim minds atrocities by any person with a Christian name comes out as a Christian action.

If I cared about and followed what and how Moslems „think" , then I should indubitably sink mentally to the level of a seven-year-old kid. A Moslem is unable to think rationally , outside his narrow Islam horizon. An Islamic dictator's crimes remain Islamic crimes as his assistants and in most cases he himself do them within their religious mind frame or under a religious pretext and according to traditions outside which they can't think and imagine the world .

In case of crimes committed in Europe (e.g. Nazism) they have nothing to do with Christianity as the latter lost any grip on our minds as it had discredited itself by its century-long medieval moral decadance and its intellectual bankruptcy and impotence. Christianity was largely overcome by rationalism. Those who perpetrated crimes were in most cases no believing Christians while they were far from rationalism. They were product of the great European moral crisis after the end of Christianity.

I know it's perhaps hard to imagine (let alone acquiesce in) that in Christian America where Christianity is still seen as a pancea for all diseases and lack of this panacea causes allegedly most diseases. Sed cuique suum, care Plato.

> The problem with the Muslims is that the vast majority have only knowledge of the rituals of their religion and very little of the ideology that underpins it - the call to jihad, the poor ethics of its theology and its founder.

In short - ignorance is strength.

> They have been conned into believing that it is a religion that is peacful by nature and that its bloody past can be compared favourably with the past of other religions, especially Christianity.

You can con any seven year-old child into believing anything , as Schopenhauer once noted. That someone dares try to con non-Moslems to believe that scrap is due perhaps to the fact that either he (I don't mean you of course , Plato!) is a Moslem or is himslef on the intellectual level of a seven-year-old child. Otherwise I can't account for for this puerile argument.

> By bringing up the Armenian genocide as an Islamic one when Turkey had by then, at least at the government level, jettisoned Islam as a state religion and tried to adopt Western values (probably unsuccessfuly at the mass level)

What are you saying , dear friend ? The young Turks (the Committee for Progress and Unity) that came to power in 1908 were fanatic Moslems and despised the Westerners (as Mustafa also disdained all foreigners) and they commenced the genocide of the Armenians in the spring of 1915. By 1917 this genocide was largely completed as far as the Russians had not managed to save the Armenians by occupying Eastern Armenia between 1914-1917 . They smashed the Turks in two major battles around Sarykamysh and Erzerum and occupied Trapezunt in 1916. Had it not been for the Bolshevik revolution , Turkey would have been reduced to what it should be .

> the Nazi ones will and is brought up by Muslim apologists as a Christian one.

Can you seriously believe the Moslems know anything of history. For them history is just an ancillary branch of theology. They have no history as science. So why bother ?

> There are enough and more Muslim atrocities admittedly committed in the name of Islam from day one for the Ataturk one to matter in the larger picture.

Absolutely right!

> The Muslim world will never be able to be a patch on the free world for the reason that their intellectual level has hit the iron ceiling of Islam.

I agree.

> Yes they will do a lot of harm before they break through that ceiling and let the light of freedom into their mental spaces.

You're too optimistic , dear Plato.

> I sound general because I am a generalist, not a specialist, so the soup will remain watery but I hope the taste of the meat come through.

I am a vegetarian, so I don't generally like this taste .

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