Why the Middle East hates the West - Part III

Right... American imperialism... the wars of the American empire, the "empire of oil". [Hey, wasn't there a company called "Imperial Oil" in Canada? Ed.] Yes, Ed., indeed there was! It was part of the Standard Oil empire, and retains the brand name "Esso" to this day. But let's move on...

If you buy Walt's argument that the USA is fighting in the Middle East to protect its empire against Islamic nationalist fanatics, you might pause to consider the fate of previous empires. The Russians and "Soviets" tried twice to invade and conquer Afghanistan. So did the British, who in the first half of the 20th century considered all of the Middle East, from the Gulf to Pakistan, to be within their sphere of influence.

Going back to ancient history, the Greeks had some success in that region. Alexander the Great penetrated as far as Kafiristan, a historical region that covered present-day Nuristan Province in Afghanistan. (If you've seen the admirable movie version of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, you'll know where I'm going with this.)

The Roman Empire, at its greatest extent, included the Holy Land, as well as Syria and "Mesopotamia" (more or less the same as northern Iraq), the very land which ISIS is fighting to take over today. That area was one of the first parts of the Roman Empire to fall. The Romans just gave up on it. They didn't know about the oil!

As Edward Gibbon tells us -- click here to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an e-book -- the Roman Empire imploded. It decayed and crumbled from within, doomed by its abandonment of the principles and policies that made it great. The Romans lost their respect for their gods and for decent living. They put pleasure ahead of civic duty, and gave themselves over to hedonism and excess.

The same thing happened in America, then "the rest of the West", in the 1960s. I refer to the rise of the hippie "movement" and the era of "flower power". Sex, drugs and indolence became a way of life for hundreds of thousands of (mostly white, middle-class) American youths. Such gurus of hippiedom as Timothy Leary encouraged young people to "turn on, tune in and drop out", and that's exactly what they did.

So what (I hear you ask). The toxins of those days have been neutralized by the materialism and hard times of the 80s and 90s. Yes, the drugs are still there, but you don't see all those dirty kids panhandling on the streets any more. Young people are going to school, working, having families, much as before. The hippie daze was just a blip.

Maybe so (I answer), but the West never recovered its respect for religion, its sense of community and ideals of civic duty and national pride. Mark Steyn and others have quite rightly drawn parallels with the decline of Rome and the decline of America today. See also James Burnham's Suicide of the West (Random House 1970), written at the height of the hippie craze.

What does the hippie craze have to do with the hatred of America exhibited in much of the world -- especially the Middle East -- today? It's this. How can you love or even respect a nation which does not love or respect itself?

A half-century ago, before the hippies exported their scruffy lifestyle to the rest of the world, Americans were generally respected, even admired. Foreigners had never seen Americans wandering around their streets naked and stoned, begging for spare change, epitomizing decadence. Then came the hippies.

The reaction of people in places like Afghanistan was summed up by a director of that country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, quoted by Suzanne Labin in Hippies, drogues et sexe -- translated in English as Hippies, Drugs and Promiscuity (Arlington House 1972):

The West [he said] has always been the symbol of culture, of enterprise, of civility, of power, of artistic splendor for us. And now we have the children of this West in the streets of Kabul: dressed  like tramps, stretched out on tables, begging in the streets, scornful of learning, spending full-time on drugs or, at best, guitars. We have the impression that the marrow of your civilization is rotting. [Emphasis mine. Walt]

The sons of our more prominent families have traditionally had only one aspiration: to go study in the brilliant West. Now they don't want to go any more, and besides, their families -- in whom the traditions of good breeding, of order, and of respect for the traditional ways are still very much alive -- agree that their  children should not go off into your world of perdition. The hippies have turned our youth away from the West.

The people of the Middle East -- "moderate Muslims" as well as Islamic extremists -- reject Western society as it now appears, dominated by what I'll call the American "culture of whatever". There is no sense of responsibility, only of "rights". There is no morality, no sense of right and wrong, not even in the Church. ("Who am I to judge?")

What is left of the "hippie culture" is the idea that anything goes. "If it feels good, do it." And, "If you don't want to do it, you don't have to." The people of the Middle East -- not to mention the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America -- don't want their society to become like ours. Who can blame them?!

A lesson from ancient Rome about illegal immigration

Agent 6 spotted a good article on the BizShift-Trends website: Struggle of Illegal Immigration – Parallels Between U.S. and Ancient Rome: Lesson Learned, Unintended Consequence.

Because it was more civilized and prosperous than the barbaric tribes living outside its borders, the Roman Empire was flooded with illegal immigrants, for the same reason that Europe and North America are being inundated today. Life is better for the illegals here than in the corruption-ridden and poverty-stricken states they call "home". And of course there are the welfare and social benefits we foolishly extend to them, to assuage the hurt we inflicted on them in the bad old colonial days.

Every now and then, as in the Excited States of America at the moment, someone discovers that there are millions of illegals living amongst us, sponging off the legal residents who pay taxes, and demands that something be done about it. At the same time, residents of Planet Crackpot march in our streets, chanting "Nobody is illegal", and demanding that all the wetbacks and bogus refugees be given amnesty, freed from fear of deportation, and entitled to even more "rights" than they enjoy now.

Walt offers excerpts from the article, in which the writer discusses what happened when the governors of Rome decided, as President Obarmy did just recently, to let all the illegals "come in from the shadows".

Around the middle of 4th century AD, conditions outside boundaries of the Roman Empire became so bad that large numbers of people who were not citizens of the empire wanted entry for a better life… And just like in U.S. today, there were many ancient Romans, at that time, who believed that any kind of immigration (illegal or not) was good for the country and there were economic benefits that could be derived from allowing illegals to stay and settle in the country.

Isn’t that today’s U.S. story line; illegals are doing work Americans won’t do and the economy will suffer without their low-cost labor? The ancient Romans subsequently changed laws to give illegals legal status. Once illegals had legal status, other illegals wanted to enter the empire to gain legal status also. (Sounds familiar). It’s estimated that there are between 12 and 20 million illegals in the U.S., and under various proposals that are being considered by U.S. government, almost all of illegals will be given opportunity to gain legal status and eventual citizenship.

There are lessons that can be learned from past great movement of illegals... They overwhelmed the ancient Roman Empire, smothered its culture. The U.S. is now at a critical point; either effective action is taken or the country faces much greater issues later, as the ancient Romans did.

There are no easy solutions for illegal immigration, for example; many immigration advocates say that it’s impossible for the U.S. to deport the many millions of illegals in the country, so just let them stay. But others say, that since illegals are here to work and make money, which many of them send to families in their country of origin, if existing laws against the employment of illegals were enforced, the magnet of employment would disappear. And without the prospect of work many or most of the illegals would deport themselves.

The presence of millions of people who have no regard for the U.S. culture or traditions, who speak little English, whose loyalties lie elsewhere, is not a recipe for a healthy country. The prospect of taking action to legalize millions of illegals -- which will attract tens of millions more -- is a recipe for national suicide.

The emphasis above is Walt's. Thanks again to Agent 6 for sending us the URL.

Russia set to ban queer propaganda

How do you feel about this photo, gentle reader? Call me a homophobe if you will, but it fills me with revulsion. In plain words, it makes me want to puke. But we -- and our children -- are exposed to images like this every day. 1000s of them. In the print media, on TV, in movies, on billboards -- everywhere you look.

It's all LGBT propaganda, designed and published by the queers -- they don't mind being called that, nowadays -- to force their "gay rights" agenda down or throats or up our nether orifices.

In this, they have the support and encouragement of very powerful people. There's the lamestream media, the liberal "intelligentsia" and the "progressive thinkers", dominated by members of a certain religion which I must not name for fear of an attack by the JDL. And then there are the politicians who are not members of the tribe, but who know whose asses to kiss to get elected.

Or re-elected. Just today I heard the Prez rabbitting on again about how "we" are going to finish what "we" started, including the strengthening of "gay marriage rights".

In Ontario, former education minister Kathleen Wynne -- a proud lesbian mentioned here before -- is regarded (by the Toronto Red Star, of course) as a serious contender to take over the leadership of the governing Liberal Party. She would thus become Canada's first openly lesbian premier. One of her first priorities would doubtless be to reinstate her pro-LGBT curriculum for Ontario's schools, so that little straight children can be taught that it's not just OK, but desirable to be queer. Yes, and have sex with vegetables too.
What is the goal of all this? Dear readers, it's not just to make deviant behaviour legal and socially acceptable. The aim is nothing less than the destruction of western society. That is what those controlling the media and "popular opinion" really want.

Don't believe me? Consider the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. One of the great themes of Edward Gibbon's classic work is that the greatest empire the world had ever known succumbed to barbarian invasions due to the gradual loss of virtue -- civic, military and personal -- among its citizens. The Rome of the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. was rife with corruption and depravity. It was not just immoral but amoral. No-one cared about anything except the pursuit of pleasure. Thus it was ripe and ready for the scourge of the barbarian hordes.

The West finds itself in the same position today -- prone -- and America is no exception. Nor is the mainstream Church, which some would say has already been corrupted by the very same vices which we are told are not really sinful at all. Just "alternative lifestyles" or "different strokes for different strokes" -- that's all.

The government of one -- just one -- nominally Christian country has finally decided that enough is enough. That nation is Russia, whose rulers, with the support of the Orthodox Church, have introduced legislation which will make it illegal to provide minors with "propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism." If it happened in Ontario -- wishful thinking -- it would be called the Anti-Wynne Act.

The proposed law, which is all but certain of enactment, includes a ban on holding public events that promote gay rights. St. Petersburg and a number of other Russian cities recently put similar statutes on the books to prohibit "Gay Pride parades", long promoted in the West but still something of a novelty in the former Communist bloc.

The bill is part of an effort to promote traditional Russian values as opposed to Western liberalism, which the Kremlin and church see as corrupting Russian youth. "Progressive thinkers" inside and outside Russia are already wringing their hands and hissing with horror, but (Associated Press reports) most "average Russians" are reacting with either indifference or open enthusiasm.

Polls conducted last year show that almost two-thirds of Russians find homosexuality "morally unacceptable and worth condemning." About half are against gay rallies and same-sex marriage. Almost a third think homosexuality is the result of "a sickness or a psychological trauma,".

Unlike in America, Britain and Canada, Russia's political and religious elite share Ivan Sixpack's hostility to homosexuality. Lawmakers have accused gays of decreasing Russia's already low birth rates and said they should be barred from government jobs, undergo forced medical treatment or be exiled.

Orthodox activists have criticized PepsiCo for using a "gay" rainbow on cartons of its dairy products. An executive with a government-run TV network said in a nationally televised talk show that gays should be prohibited from donating blood, sperm and organs for transplants, while after death their hearts should be burned or buried.

The sponsors of the bill say minors need to be protected from "homosexual propaganda" because they are unable to evaluate the information critically. In the words of the bill, "This propaganda goes through the mass media and public events that propagate homosexuality as normal behavior."

Our last word on the subject -- for today -- comes from Rev. Sergiy Rybko, an Orthodox priest. Although Ed. has not been able to track down the original quote, AP says Father Rybko told the online magazine Orthodoxy and World, "Until this scum gets off of Russian land, I fully share the views of those who are trying to purge our motherland of it. We either become a tolerant Western state where everything is allowed – and lose our Christianity and moral foundations – or we will be a Christian people who live in our God-protected land in purity and godliness."

Now there's a strong and thoroughly un-PC statement. I wish I'd said it. Better yet, I wish our Catholic bishops would say it. Amen.

Redistributing wealth won't save us

The fiscal cliff, the 1% vs the 99%, taxing the middle class out of existance... What it all comes down to is the wisdom of the Almighty State taking from them as has to give to give to them as has not.

There's no doubt the State can do so if it wishes. But is it the smart thing to do? Can the government legislating the "poor" into prosperity? Walt thinks not (lifetime pct .984) and argues from the record of two great empires.

Consider the mighty and long-lived Roman Empire. History tells us an important factor in the slow demise of Rome was excessive welfare. This was mandated by Roman senators to buy voter support. They feathered their own nests while keeping the poor quiet with bread and circuses. Not much has changed in two millenia, has it.

Now think about Japan. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by American atomic bombs in August of 1945. Nothing left. But look at them now! The two cities -- indeed the whole country -- have redeveloped beyond anyone's imagination.

How did the Japanese become so prosperous so quickly? They do not have a welfare system. You work or do without. Which caused more long-term destruction: the A-bomb or government welfare programmes created to buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?

What we're talking about, dear readers, is the importance of incentives. Walt will explain in five sentences.

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

That's not intended to be an argument for no taxes. The Romans had taxes. The Japanese have taxes. There will probably be taxes in hell. It is, however, an argument for a flat tax, an idea whose time has come... and gone... again and again. But keep it in mind as you listen to the wrangling about who's going to pay for all the entitlements and social programmes that the vote-hungry politicians and lamestream media tell us we must have.