The moral gyroscope

If you can throw off the steady compass that keeps a civilization on course, you can redirect that whole nation/state/empire. And, as this piece in RealClearPolitics analyzes, bring it down.

The intellectual elites of the left, both here and in Britain and Europe, are resuscitating moral equivalence, this time promoting the idea that the values of the West are no better than the nostrums of the Islamists. Bernard Lewis, the distinguished scholar of the history of the Middle East, doesn’t like the terms “left” and “right,” but he applies them to Europeans of the left who encourage radical Muslims who spout anti-American slogans and the Europeans on the right who encourage Muslims who vow to destroy the Jews: “In Europe, their hatreds outweigh their loyalties.”

So, what they stand against is greater than what they stand for…?

Bruce Bawer makes this point in his book, “While Europe Slept: How Radicalism Is Destroying the West from Within.” One of the most disgraceful developments of our time, he writes, “is that many Western intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the cold-blooded murder of one’s own children in the name of honor.” Young Europeans who wear Che Guevara T-shirts and Palestinian scarves, to identify with a “glamorous” revolution that exists only in their naive imaginations, are dangerously out of touch with the authentic peril in the world.

That’s happening all over, I’ve mentioned it here before. That ignorance of history is, indeed, dangerous.

Andrew Roberts looks for a parallel in the decay of the Roman Empire, whose destruction was midwifed more by “the vociferous critics within their own society” than by “the declared enemies without.” In “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” he cites Marxists who blame Western imperialism, not Muslim extremists, and who teach Western history as “crimes against humanity,” promoting multiculturalism to retard assimilation.

That ‘enemy within’ is as active here as it is in Europe, and it has to be identified like this and engaged if it’s destruction is to be stopped.

Tony Blair, who endures the increasing hatred of certain Englishmen for his resistance to jihad, identifies what’s at stake. “The struggle in our world today therefore is not just about security, it is a struggle about values and about modernity — whether to be at ease with it or rage at it,” he told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council last year. “To win, we have to win the battle of values, as much as arms.” Like a lot of the rest of us, he’s incredulous that so much Western opinion blames the West for terrorism, for perpetuating poverty. If poverty is really a concern of the terrorists, where are the fanatics championing economic development?

“We have to win the battle of values…” That’s the heart of it, as Benedict says below.