Hanson: trashing the West to save it?

Ben writes:

An interesting article by Victor Hanson. This one is not too long and worth your notice. What’s interesting is what he says. The Dark Ages, a time when Western civilization was on a constant defense from Islam, yet Hanson decides that the Dark Ages (and later periods as well) was an evil period of time not due to Islamic aggression but due to the West. I come to this conclusion by his not providing one example of the constant Muslim aggression in history, but his deciding that giving examples of other cultures’ evils is more appropriate, especially Western.

“It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.”

What a great way to show Islam’s threat to the West by providing Western historical examples to try and show that our great grandfathers we’re no better then the Islamic Imams of today. To call our ancestors civilization “savage.” Way to go Hanson, what a great way to inspire the confidence you wish to be revived in the West when you say …

“The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no longer knew what it was to be Roman—much less whether it was any better than the alternative.”

…. yet not one word of historical evidence to show that Islam has never changed since it’s creation, nor any mention that Islam was a constant enemy of our civilization for a millennium, nor any love for the historical Western civilization, one that we should wish to defend….

“Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval?”

… no…. Just examples of Western/Christianity’s historical wrongs. What a great way to inspire us to stand in defense of our civilization against Islam. Good going Hanson!

LA replies:

I like Ben’s analysis. I disagree slightly, in that I think some of Hanson’s argument is valid. There were nightmares in our past, that we thought were past, but now to our horror it turns out they’re not. Obviously, not all references to bad things in our past are illegitimate.

But by and large I agree with Ben. Hanson has no loyalty to the historic Western civilization—only to modern liberalism. His main trope is to say Islam is bad because it is like the Western past. That’s despicable.

Ben replies:

Sorry if I made it sound as if I was dismissing Western wrongs, I wasn’t. My point is he didn’t list even one Islamic historical wrong, not one, just Western. Reading Hanson’s article, you would think Islam just became bad recently and was good up until now.

If you’re making an argument that Islam is becoming an aggressor against the West, you don’t do it by pointing out past Western wrongs or ancient Greece. He completely ignores Islamic history.

Charlton C. writes:

One of the irritating things about these kinds of articles is that they never seem to take into consideration the essential dynamic of Western civilization, which is the continual upward slope toward what I guess we could call “progress” for lack of a better term. The original conception of the individual begins in ancient Greece. For the first time man came to realize that as an individual, he had self worth that was apart from the political organization of his city. We often forget this. No such realization has ever dawned on the Muslim and, indeed, it cannot. People like Hanson, Rice and others, do grave injustice to our civilization when they do not explain this vast difference between us and Islam. Without a sense of individual worth, no progress is possible over an extended period of time. There may be progress in fits and starts, as there was in Islam historically, but it always sinks back into its ingrained lethargy. We see this so clearly in the Middle East.

Bill Carpenter writes:

Your current comment on Hanson brings this to mind. The sometimes hysterical insistence on our superior “values” is a symptom of liberalism. For liberals, we only have value to the extent we subscribe to liberal values. We only have the right to defend ourselves against enemies to the extent we have liberal values. It is another feature of the proposition nation. Abstracted from our substance and our identity, we only have value by virtue of our ideological commitments.

We can only wage war by embodying our liberal values in strategy and tactics. The only valid goal is to establish liberal society. The only valid tactics are to disable threatening equipment, not to destroy enemies. Anything more is non-liberal and therefore invalid.

A sane person thinks everyone has the right to defend himself, regardless of his “values,” and communities do too. We can do that at someone else’s expense. That leads to a certain amount of friction. So it goes.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2006 01:40 AM | Send