“City on Fire–Burning the roots of western culture”

That’s the name of a site-specific aesthetic “event”—a sort of Christo on crack—now circulating around Europe, in which various cultural monuments are made to appear as if they are being destroyed by fire. The announcement for the exhibit’s current incarnation says: “ARoS is the biggest museum in Scandinavia. Intense fire will be projected on the building, creating the illusion that this institution is burning.”

The purpose of the exhibit, as explained by its creators Thyra Hilden and Pio Diaz, is to invoke the destruction, and the destructiveness, of Western culture.

So, based on recent postings at VFR, here’s a partial sketch of the cultural lay of the land at the moment, going from left to, uh, “right.”

We’ve got Diaz and Hilden in mainstream museum events invoking the all-out Nihilism of Destruction against European civilization: “We want to die, we want our culture to go out of existince, we want to be taken over by Muslims—faster, please!”

To the right of Hilden and Diaz, we’ve got the moderate liberal Francis Fukuyama, who, concerned about the threat to the West posed by unassimilable Muslims, makes rhetorical moves in the direction of a renewed Western cultural identity, which turns out to be the same pallid universalist liberalism that permitted the Muslims to enter the West in the first place.

To the right of Fukuyama, we’ve got the newly minted social conservative Dinesh D’Souza, who bracingly calls for the West to return to moral traditionalism. The main way this traditionalism should manifest itself in practice, D’Souza tells us, is by forming an alliance with traditional Muslims against the Western left, and, nota bene, by never criticizing Islam, because that might make our Muslim friends want to mass-murder us. D’Souza’s “social conservatism” is thus identical in its key features to the dhimmi pact.

And finally, to the right of D’Souza, we’ve got the Churchillian British conservative Leo McKinstry, who calls on the British people to defy the Muslim enemy and spit in his teeth and never surrender and, and … to keep letting him invade Britain.

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From: Jeff in England
Subject: THESE SUSPECTS ARE ON FIRE ROLLING DOWN THE ROAD….

Your SUSPECTS ON FIRE addition to the CITIES ON FIRE exhibit was innovative, insightful and funny. These SUSPECTS may reply that you are being sarcastic and even insulting. The reality is that you are trying to bring some real logic to the discussion by pointing out that all of the USUAL SUSPECTS, from Fukuyama to D’Souza to Spencer to Phillips to Pipes to Hanson to McKinstry to Blankley to Michael Savage and all his fellow conservative talk show hosts, have failed to provide any sort of significant SOLUTION to the problem of the dangers of the Muslim presence in the West.

It simply isn’t good enough to write brilliantly about the problem without providing a SOLUTION. You, I and others have suggested the very logical SOLUTION of a significant reduction in Islamic immigration. I publicly ask any of the USUAL SUSPECTS mentioned who read this to come forth with other SOLUTIONS to the problem. Forget about any personal animosities to Lawrence Auster. Put aside your fears at being seen to be unjust or even racist. SOLUTIONS are needed and quickly.

By the way, despite the recent arguments between David Yerushalmi of SANE and yourself, I respect Yerushalmi for at least providing a possible SOLUTION to the problem. In my opinion his SOLUTION goes way too far but at least he is making an attempt to deal with the problem. As I’ve said before, if the other USUAL SUSPECTS cannot write articles with logical SOLUTIONS included, they need to step aside and let in other writers who will.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 27, 2007 10:31 PM | Send