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2007-03-14 Home Front: Culture Wars
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Mark Steyn does NPR
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. . . I dont mind the conspiracy guys and the all-about-oil obsessives. Im cool with the fellows who say, well, America sold Saddam all his weapons anyway: its always fun to point out that, according to analysis by the International Peace Research Institute of Stockholm, for the years between 1973 and 2002 the American and British arm sales combined added up to under 2% of Iraqs armaments or less than Saddam got from the Brazilians.
Thats all good fun. But what befuddles me are the callers who arent foaming and partisan but speak in almost eerily calm voices, like patient kindergarten teachers, and say things like I find it very offensive that your guest can use language thats so hierarchical - i.e., repressive Muslim dictatorships are worse than pluralist western democracies - and We are confronting violence with violence, when what we need is non-violent conflict resolution thats binding on all sides i.e.
well, i.e. whatever.
Half the time these assertions are such enervated soft-focus blurs of passivity, theres nothing solid enough to latch on to and respond to. But, when, as they often do, they cite Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, I point out that were not always as fortunate to find ourselves up against such relatively benign enemies as British imperial administrators or even American racist rednecks. King and Gandhis strategies would not have been effective against fellows who gun down classrooms of Russian schoolchildren, or self-detonate at Muslim weddings in Amman, or behead you live on camera and then release it as a snuff video, or assassinate politicians and as theyre dying fall to the ground and drink their blood off the marble. Come to that, King and Gandhis strategies would not have been effective against the prominent British Muslim who in a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin announced that the Prophet Mohammeds message to infidels was I am here to slaughter you all. Good luck with the binding non-violent conflict resolution there.
And at that point theres usually a pause and the caller says something like Well, thats all the more reason why we need to be even more committed to non-violence. Or as a lady called Kay put it: We have a lot of work to do then so that some day a long way down the road they wont want to slaughter us.
There may, indeed, come a day when they wont want to slaughter us, but it may be because by that day theres none of us left to slaughter. She had just told me that were all in this together. I dont care if youre Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist. Good for you. Unfortunately, they do care. In Gaza, in Sudan, in Kashmir, in southern Thailand, they care very much. But the great advantage of cultural relativism is that it absolves you of the need to know anything. For, if everythings of equal value, why bother learning about any of the differences?
On the whole I prefer those Americans who tune out the foreign-policy bores for wall-to-wall Anna Nicole Smith coverage: at least theyve got an interest ask them about the latest scoop on the identity of the father of her child and theyll bring you up to speed. By contrast, a large number of elite Americans are just as parochial and indifferent to the currents of the age; the only difference is that they choose to trumpet it as a moral virtue. And you cant avoid the suspicion that, far from having a lot of work to do, a lot of us are heavily invested in a belief in pacifism because it involves doing no work at all apart from bending down once every couple of years and slapping the CO-EXIST bumper sticker on your new car.
Or as I said somewhat tetchily to one caller, Life isnt a bumper sticker. 
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Posted by Mike 2007-03-14 06:21||
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