Clash Of Civilizations Quotes

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.

Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.

So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.

Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization. It is basically an anti-Western ideology.

There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.

It’s not enough to say it’s shocking, it’s appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.

God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture. Only in Hindu civilization were religion and politics also so distinctly separated. In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar’s junior partner.

The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.

Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.

We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.

Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.

Such is the tragedy of girls and women who by the strictures of their upbringing and culture cannot own up to their body's desires, even to themselves.

Unlike white commentators, who were hamstrung by the fear that they would be labeled racist, I could voice my criticisms of the feudal, religious, and repressive mechanisms that were holding back women from Muslim communities.

the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do.”16

The trap of resentment. It is probably the worst mental prison in the world. It is the inability to let go of anger and the perceived or real injustices we suffer. Some people let one or two, or maybe ten unpleasant experiences poison the rest of their lives. They let their anger ferment and rot their personality. They end up seeing themselves as victims of their parents, teachers, their peers and preachers.

interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness. Alone among civilizations the West

Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.

ability of Asian regimes to resist Western human rights pressures was reinforced by several factors. American and European businesses were desperately anxious to expand their trade with and their investment in these rapidly

In the post-Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people.

The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings. Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence, and judge. Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.

If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask for permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority.

One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.

A primordial instinct going back to humanity's tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked. Oddly enough, it is the market -- the least overtly spiritual of concepts -- that delivers a profoundly spiritual message: that it is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain.

Again and again both Westerners and non-Westerners point to individualism as the central distinguishing mark of the West.

Religion for them, as Régis Debray put it, is not “the opium of the people, but the vitamin of the weak.

What, however, makes culture and ideology attractive? They become attractive when they are seen as rooted in material success and influence. Soft power is power only when it rests on a foundation of hard power. Increases in hard economic and military power produce enhanced self-confidence, arrogance, and belief in the superiority of one’s own culture or soft power compared to those of other peoples and greatly increase its attractiveness to other peoples. Decreases in economic and military power lead to self-doubt, crises of identity, and efforts to find in other cultures the keys to economic, military, and political success.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

The pope also knows that wherever radical Islamists become a majority they oppress other faiths. In Muslim countries there is no equal competition for souls, hearts, and minds, because atheists and missionaries and communities of Christians are forced to operate in an atmosphere of physical menace. And although there are plenty of mosques in Rome, not a single church is permitted in Riyadh.

The argument was this: a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart. And so, in the clash of these two extreme systems, one is witness to brute stupidity and blood-splashed insensitivity; two belligerent faces glowering at each other across the unfathomed distance, and yet, in deed and in fanatic regard, they are but mirror reflections. This would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetically idiotic…

انا لا اوافق على وصف كرة القدم بانها مجرد لعبة للتسلية و تمضية الوقت . كرة القدم هي مدرسة تعلمك الجد و الصبر و المثابرة و حب الفوز و المقاومة الى اخر ثانية

Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.

Charlotte Sykes approaching from the washrooms. She had changed into high heels and a tangerine-colored blouse that clashed with all her best intentions.

Cultural assertion follows material success; hard power generates soft power.

In Malta, the Wars of Religion reached their climax. If both sides believed that they saw Paradise in the bright sky above them, they had a close and very intimate knowledge of Hell.

The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. By the time they menstruate they are rendered voiceless. They are reared to become submissive robots who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks. They are required to comply with their father's choice of a mate, and after the wedding their lives are devoted to the sexual pleasures of their husband and to a life of childbearing.

On January 3, 1992, a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow. Two weeks earlier the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and the Russian Federation had become an independent country. As a result, the statue of Lenin which previously graced the stage of the auditorium had disappeared and instead the flag of the Russian Federation was now displayed on the front wall. The only problem, one American observed, was that the flag had been hung upside down.

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better. In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse. Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, “Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?” There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.

Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse.

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and "burkas", are all gradations of mental slavery. (...) The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. (...) I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated (...) by so many Western societies where the equality of sexes is legally enshrined.

Given that some ethnic groups—especially ones with high levels of ethnocentrism and mobilization—will undoubtedly continue to function as groups far into the foreseeable future, unilateral renunciation of ethnic loyalties by some groups means only their surrender and defeat—the Darwinian dead end of extinction. The future, then, like the past, will inevitably be a Darwinian competition in which ethnicity plays a very large role. The alternative faced by Europeans throughout the Western world is to place themselves in a position of enormous vulnerability in which their destinies will be determined by other peoples, many of whom hold deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. Europeans' promotion of their own displacement is the ultimate foolishness—an historical mistake of catastrophic proportions.

Here was an extraordinary state accomplishment: mass enthusiasm at the prospect of a global brawl that otherwise would mystify those very masses, and that shattered most of those who actually took part in it. The Anglo-American drive to demonize “the Hun,” and to cast the war as a transcendent clash between Atlantic “civilization” and Prussian “barbarism,” made so powerful an impression on so many that the worlds of government and business were forever changed.

If they lived in Saudi Arabia, under Shari’a law, these college girls in their pretty scarves wouldn’t be free to study, to work, to drive, to walk around. In Saudi Arabia girls their age and younger are confined, are forced to marry, and if they have sex outside of marriage they are sentenced to prison and flogged. According to the Quran, their husband is permitted to beat them and decide whether they may work or even leave the house; he may marry other women without seeking their approval, and if he chooses to divorce them, they have no right to resist or to keep custody of their children. Doesn’t this matter at all to these clever young Muslim girls in America?

The philosophical assumptions, underlying values, social relations, customs, and overall outlooks on life differ significantly among civilizations. The revitalization of religion throughout much of the world is reinforcing these cultural differences. Cultures can change, and the nature of their impact on politics and economics can vary from one period to another. Yet the major differences in political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world.

The breakdown of the elevator is catastrophe that forces us to use the stairs, and in thus an offence to modernity, to development, and the enlightenment”.

It is absurd to assume that the new political societies emerging in the East will be copies of the societies we know in the West.

There were about 12,000 inhabitants in Malta, most of them poor peasants speaking a kind of Arabic dialect.

Their vessels,’ he had been told, ‘are not like others. They have always aboard them great numbers of arquebusiers and of knights who are dedicated to fight to the death.

It was they who had given the island the name Maleth, ‘A Haven’, which was later corrupted by the Greeks into Melita (‘Honey’) from which the modern name of Malta derives.

The struggle for the Islam I loved and the struggle for the West I loved were the same struggle, and it was within that struggle that the clash of civilizations was eradicated.

Wars are motivated by the need to seize the wealth of our neighbours, to wield power, to protect ourselves from real or imagined threats: in short they have, as we have seen, political, social, economic or demographic causes. There is no need to refer to Islam or the clash of civilizations to explain why the Afghans or the Iraqis resist the western military forces occupying their countries. Nor to speak of anti-Jewish sentiment or anti-Semitism to understand the reasons why the Palestinians are not overjoyed by the Israeli occupation of their lands.

يا بني اذا كنت سائرا و اعترض طريقك مسلحون و اجبروك على التحكيم : من على الحق و من على الباطل قابيل ام هابيل؟ اياك ان تقول ان قابيل على الحق و هابيل على الباطل قد يكون المسلحون هابليين فتهلك و اياك ثم اياك ان تقول ان ان قابيل على الباطل و هابيل على الحق قد يكون المسلحين قابليين فتهلك يا بني اياك ثم اياك ثم اياك ان تقول لا قابيل و لا هابيل على الباطل فتهلك فصدر هذا الزمن ضيق لا يتسع للحياد يا بني اقطع لسانك و ابلعه يا بني اهرب! اهرب! اهرب! اياك من نار الفتنة فهي اخطر من انياب الذئاب

Charles Murray, who in 1994 cowrote The Bell Curve. When his book was published I was still a student at the University of Leiden, where it seemed everyone was talking about this horribly racist book that argued that black people were genetically of lower intelligence than white people. I read it, of course, and I found it to be the opposite of racist, a compassionately written book about the urban challenges that confront black people more than white. All black people should read it.

Though the role of theistic morality in the problems besetting the Islamic world is inescapable, many Western intellectuals—who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundredfold—have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam.101 Some of the apologetics, to be sure, come from an admirable desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims. Some are intended to discredit a destructive (and possibly self-fulfilling) narrative that the world is embroiled in a clash of civilizations. Some fit into a long history of Western intellectuals execrating their own society and romanticizing its enemies (a syndrome we’ll return to shortly). But many of the apologetics come from a soft spot for religion among theists, faitheists, and Second Culture intellectuals, and a reluctance to go all in for Enlightenment humanism.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanation for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

Today China’s economic power,” Richard Nixon observed in 1994, “makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades it will make them laughable.

When the [colonial] contact was violent, in fact, failure was more frequent than success. 'Colonialism' may have triumphed in the past: but today it is an obvious fiasco. And colonialism, typically, is the submergence of one civilisation by another. The conqured always submit to the stronger; but their submission is merely provisional when civilisations clash. Long periods of enforced coexistence may include concessions or agreements and important, often fruitful, cultural exchange. But the process always has its limits.

Calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic or civilization-clashing. The overwhelming majority of victims of Islamic violence and repression are other Muslims.

both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between values. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with the material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.

Remembering the treatment that had been accorded the Knights and soldiers of St. Elmo, the Maltese inhabitants of Senglea took no prisoners. Hence there arose the expression (used in Malta to this day) 'St. Elmo's pay' for any action in which no mercy is given.

When people speak these days, about an inevitable “Clash of Civilizations” in our world, what they often mean, I fear, is an inevitable “Clash of Religions.” But I would use different terminology altogether. The essential problem, as I see it, in relations between the Muslim world and the West is “A Clash of Ignorance.” And what I would prescribe -- as an essential first step -- is a concentrated educational effort. Address by His Highness the Aga Khan to the Tutzing Evangelical Academy Upon Receiving the "Tolerance" Award - 20 May 2006 (Tutzing, Germany)

...(T)here was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn't take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn't. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its clear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.

While I do not believe we are not witnessing a "clash of civilizations" between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world's two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap.

The truth is, I don’t know what will happen across the entire world in the coming decades, and neither does anyone else. Not everyone, though, shares my reticence. A Web search for the text string “the coming war” returns two million hits, with completions like “with Islam,” “with Iran,” “with China,” “with Russia,” “in Pakistan,” “between Iran and Israel,” “between India and Pakistan,” “against Saudi Arabia,” “on Venezuela,” “in America,” “within the West,” “for Earth’s resources,” “over climate,” “for water,” and “with Japan” (the last dating from 1991, which you would think would make everyone a bit more humble about this kind of thing). Books with titles like The Clash of Civilizations, World on Fire, World War IV, and (my favorite) We Are Doomed boast a similar confidence. Who knows? Maybe they’re right. My aim in the rest of this chapter is to point out that maybe they’re wrong.

Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer

Grenville's line of Cornishmen swayed and lurched, a low growl running through the ranks like a storm far out at sea, the boulders grinding as the waves built. And then it burst, men yelling, shaking their weapons in the air, the pikes clashing, thumping the ground, shouting, demanding, exclaiming, 'Kernow vedn keskerras!' Cornwall will march!

This changing international environment brought to the fore the fundamental cultural differences between Asian and American civilizations. At the broadest level the Confucian ethos pervading many Asian societies stressed the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, “saving face,” and, in general, the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual. In addition, Asians tended to think of the evolution of their societies in terms of centuries and millennia and to give priority to maximizing long-term gains. These attitudes contrasted with the primacy in American beliefs of liberty, equality, democracy, and individualism, and the American propensity to distrust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances, encourage competition, sanctify human rights, and to forget the past, ignore the future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains. The sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture.

In wars between cultures, culture loses.

Un des plus beaux moments de l'amour est celui de la rencontre, quand on se plonge dans l'amour comme on se jette à la mer, sans s'inquiéter de détails ou de questions pénibles.

Non c'è niente di più pericoloso [...] che sottovalutare il proprio avversario, ignorare la sua logica e, tanto per negargli ogni singola ragione, definirlo un «pazzo».

They want to dissolve Europe. They want to take away our own life and change it to something which is not our life.

I can explain it to you, but I can't make you understand it.

اﻟﺪول اﻟﻘﺎﺋﻤﺔ ﰲ اﻟﻌﺎﻟﻢ اﻟﻌﺮﺑﻲ ﺗﻮاﺟه ﻣﺸﺎﻛﻞ اﻟﴩﻋﻴة ﻷﻧﻬﺎ ﰲ ﻣﻌﻈﻤﻬﺎ ﻧﺘﺎج اﻋﺘﺒﺎﻃﻲ إن ﻟﻢ ﻳﻜﻦ ﻧﺰوة ﻟﻼﺳﺘﻌﻤﺎر.

يقول ريجيه ديبراي Régis Debray أن الدين ليس (أفيون الشعوب) وإنما (فيتامين الضعفاء)

The argument was this: a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart. And so, in the clash of these two extreme systems, one is witness to brute stupidity and blood-splashed insensitivity; two belligerent faces glowering at each other across the unfathomed distance, and yet, in deed and in fanatic regard, they are but mirror reflections. This would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetically idiotic…

People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we are apt to forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago, and to be blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out.

The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity - by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbour, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.

For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations.

Death had always stalked the explorers, but in an age that held life cheap the risk had been worth the reward. Men who lived in hope of heaven and fear of hell had been eager to serve as Crusaders; men born into poverty had hungered to touch the wealth of the East. Yet the wealth had stuck to the fingers of the elite, and faith had proved a poor defense against disease, famine, and storms.

Hockey is not for pussies. Technically, it’s defined as a sport. Words like play and game get thrown around liberally to shield its true nature: hockey is warfare with water breaks. In the rink, you have over two thousand pounds of brute force clashing with whittled clubs, a rubber disc that could crush a larynx, and knives attached to feet. Let’s not pretend there’s anything civilized going on here.

During an hour-long conversation mid-flight, he laid out his theory of the war. First, Jones said, the United States could not lose the war or be seen as losing the war. 'If we're not successful here,' Jones said, 'you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' A setback or loss for the United States would be 'a tremendous boost for jihadist extremists, fundamentalists all over the world' and provide 'a global infusion of morale and energy, and these people don't need much.' Jones went on, using the kind of rhetoric that Obama had shied away from, 'It's certainly a clash of civilizations. It's a clash of religions. It's a clash of almost concepts of how to live.' The conflict is that deep, he said. 'So I think if you don't succeed in Afghanistan, you will be fighting in more places. 'Second, if we don't succeed here, organizations like NATO, by association the European Union, and the United Nations might be relegated to the dustbin of history.' Third, 'I say, be careful you don't over-Americanize the war. I know that we're going to do a large part of it,' but it was essential to get active, increased participation by the other 41 nations, get their buy-in and make them feel they have ownership in the outcome. Fourth, he said that there had been way too much emphasis on the military, almost an overmilitarization of the war. The key to leaving a somewhat stable Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame was improving governance and the rule of law, in order to reduce corruption. There also needed to be economic development and more participation by the Afghan security forces. It sounded like a good case, but I wondered if everyone on the American side had the same understanding of our goals. What was meant by victory? For that matter, what constituted not losing? And when might that happen? Could there be a deadline?

There are indeed moral universals — the Hebrew Bible calls them ‘the covenant with Noah’ and they form the basis of modern codes of human rights. But they exist to create space for cultural and religious difference…

The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world.

and only the fittest have survived to tell the tale. Those who overlook this grim fact—be they liberal politicians or head-in-the-clouds engineers—do so at their peril.1 The “clash of civilizations” thesis has far-reaching political implications. Its supporters contend that any attempt to reconcile “the West” with “the Muslim world” is doomed to failure: Muslim countries will never adopt Western values, and Western countries will never successfully absorb Muslim minorities. Accordingly,

In addition, as the Russians stopped behaving like Marxists and began behaving like Russians, the gap between Russia and the West broadened. The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, were both modern and secular and ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and material well-being. A Western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be impossible for him to do that with a Russian Orthodox nationalist.

In the coming era, in short, the avoidance of major intercivilizational wars requires core states to refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations. This is a truth which some states, particularly the United States, will undoubtedly find difficult to accept.

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values,” and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

(about King Henry of Portugal, called the Navigator) He was the single flawed figure without whom Europe’s knowledge of what lay beyond its shores might have crept forward at a far slower rate, without whom Vasco da Gama might never have sailed for India or Columbus for America.

Over twenty-five hundred years into this experiment we call the West, is there any chance of reconciling the two competing worldviews that clashed so dramatically at the end of the fourth century AD? If so, then, as with any good compromise, there will be plenty of disappointment on both sides. People of reason may have to concede that modern science has its limits. Not everything of value can be weighed and measured. People of faith may have to admit that we can no longer afford legend over history, or obedience over curiosity. In a rapidly accelerating world Big Religion has failed to keep up with a younger generation that prefers fact over fiction. But Big Science and Big Technology may be going too fast, distracting us from the ancient search for meaning that defined the original religion of Western civilization. How do we bridge the gap?

The attribution of value to a traditional religion,” Ronald Dore noted, “is a claim to parity of respect asserted against ‘dominant other’ nations, and often, simultaneously and more proximately, against a local ruling class which has embraced the values and life-styles of those dominant other nations.

As Mahathir suggested, Asians generally pursue their goals with others in ways which are subtle, indirect, modulated, devious, nonjudgmental, nonmoralistic, and non-confrontational. Australians, in contrast, are the most direct, blunt, outspoken, some would say insensitive, people in the English-speaking world.

The alt-right, a term coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, was nothing so much as the old right, with roots in the anti–civil rights Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and the anti-immigration Klan of the 1920s. It stole its style—edgy and pornographic—from the counterculture of the 1960s. The alt-right, less influenced by conservatism than by the sexual revolution, considered itself to be transgressive, a counterculture that had abandoned the moralism of the Moral Majority—or any kind of moralism—and deemed the security state erected by neoconservatives to be insufficient to the clash of civilizations; instead, it favored authoritarianism.

Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home; some have promoted universalism abroad; and some have done both. Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic mulitculturalists want to make America like the world. A multicultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American. A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible. The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity. The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.

In that century, a man adventuring by sea in the Mediterranean was likely to find the wheel of fortune turn full circle in a matter of a few hours. Dragut, greatest of all the corsairs after Barbarossa, saw La Valette when he was a galley slave and secured for him slightly more favourable conditions. Eight years later, when Dragut himself was captured by the Genoese admiral Giannettino Doria, Valette happened to be present. He sympathized with the corsair’s anger and remarked: ‘Monsieur Dragut—it is the custom of war.’ To which Dragut wryly replied, ‘And change of Fortune.’ Valette’s own captor, Kust-Aly, was in turn taken by La Valette, then chief admiral of the Order’s fleet, in 1554, and sent to the oars along with twenty-two other prisoners.

In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.

A consumer-driven, advertising-dominated culture militates daily against ongoing attachments. It is constantly inviting us to switch to a different brand, try something new, go for a better deal elsewhere. It should not come as a surprise that this begins to affect human relationships as well. A society saturated by market values would be one in which relationships were temporary, loyalties provisional and commitments easily discarded.

VII. LOOKING FORWARD How two theories of the future of America clashed and blended just after the Civil War: the one was abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private profit directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power. The uncomprehending resistance of the South, and the pressure of black folk, made these two thoughts uneasy and temporary allies.

If I liked listening to him, it was not because I believed or even respected the stuff he mouthed off every day at Café Algiers, but because there was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn't take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I hear instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of making, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behaviour of humanity but really wasn't. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its dear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.

В този смисъл възраждането на незападните религии е най-мощната проява на антизападната нагласа в незападните общества. Това възраждане не означава отхвърляне на модернизацията, то е отхвърляне на Запада и на светската, релативистка, дегенерирала култура, свързвана със Запада. Това е отхвърляне на онова, което се нарича „позападняване“ на незападните общества. То е декларация за културната независимост от Запада, гордо заявление: „Ще станем модерни, но ние няма да се превърнем във вас.

When the U.S. Senate was first conceived by the Founders, it was meant to be a forum for civilized debate. And for a long time it was, with scholars like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan among its ranks. These were people of ideas who relished a good give-and-take, the clash of intellects, and the possibility of finding common ground. This is not the modern U.S. Senate, where debate is often confused with authoritative Ted Kennedy–style yelling.

I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH). From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits? We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea? What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying.

The weakening of the state and the emergence of failed states contribute to a fourth image of a world in anarchy. This paradigm emphasises the decline of governmental authority, the disintegration of states, the intensification of ethnic, religious and tribal conflicts, the rise of international criminal organisations, refugee numbers growing into the tens of millions, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the spread of terrorism and the prevalence of mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

Corporate elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global anarchy, define the clash as one between Western civilization and racist thugs and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme nationalists, anarchists, religious fundamentalists, and jihadists a baffling irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their duplicity, greed, use of indiscriminate industrial violence, and hypocrisy.

But here in my hometown, history was like a fine dust that settled out on everything. There was nothing to counter it. The culture had been hardened by a religion suspect of joy, yet fascinated by sin. Its moral acceptance of slavery eroded compassion. And gentility became a necessary pretense to cover the resentment created long ago when the North’s industrial prestige trumped the agrarian South. It was not an easy place to feel lighthearted or triumphant. Nor was it an easy place to remember the beauty of wonder and awe.

Many pundits, politicians and ordinary citizens believe that the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, the Brexit mayhem and the instability of the European Union all result from a clash between ‘Western Civilisation’ and ‘Islamic Civilisation’. Western attempts to impose democracy and human rights on Muslim nations resulted in a violent Islamic backlash, and a wave of Muslim immigration coupled with Islamic terrorist attacks caused European voters to abandon multicultural dreams in favour of xenophobic local identities.

In this sense, English is the world’s way of communicating interculturally just as the Christian calendar is the world’s way of tracking time, Arabic numbers are the world’s way of counting, and the metric system is, for the most part, the world’s way of measuring. The use of English in this way, however, is intercultural communication; it presupposes the existence of separate cultures. A lingua franca is a way of coping with linguistic and cultural differences, not a way of eliminating them. It is a tool for communication not a source of identity and community

The world has enjoyed a notably long period marked by relative peace and security. Nevertheless, the forecasts of increasing fragile states, mounting conflicts born of natural resource scarcity, and the rising risk in the incidence of terrorism around the world all point to an increasingly politically volatile world, one that is worsened by economic uncertainty. The Horizon 2025: Creative Destruction in the Aid Industry report cautions that within the next decade more than 80 percent of the world’s population will live in fragile states, susceptible to civil wars that could spill into cross-border conflicts.4 The US National Intelligence Council has published a similarly dire forecast of more clashes in decades to come. While this study focuses largely on the prospect of natural resource conflicts, water especially, it underscores the political vulnerability of many economies. A 2016 report by the Institute for Economics and Peace concludes 2014 was the worst year for terrorism in a decade and a half, with attacks in ninety-three countries resulting in 32,765 people killed; 29,376 people died the year before, making 2013 the second worst year.5

From the president came the view that the Union was sacred and permanent, paramount to other considerations. From the vice president, the Union was important but subject to the South’s unique standard of liberty, dissolvable in the event that the Union was no longer advantageous. From the secretary of state, a reminder that the Union in its origins and preservation had always been the product of compromise. These divergent perspectives would clash, compete, and come to define the presidency of Jackson and those of his successors, not to be resolved until the close of a great war,

Основният проблем за Запада не е ислямският фундаментализъм. Той е ислямът, една различна цивилизация, чието население е убедено в превъзходството на своята култура и е обхванато от мания за малоценността на своята мощ. Проблемът за исляма не е ЦРУ или Министерството на отбраната на САЩ. Той е Западът, една различна цивилизация, чието население е убедено в универсалността на своята култура и вярва, че неговата доминираща, макар и западаща мощ му вменява в дълг да разпространява западната култура в целия свят. Това са основните компоненти, които подхранват конфликта между исляма и Запада.

this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of

And indeed, Fred Rogers placed kindness at the root of all he said and did on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a program that began in 1968, a time of social and cultural upheaval in the United States. With a contentious war being waged in Vietnam and violent clashes over civil rights at home, Mister Rogers treated all children and adults who tuned in to his show or who visited his make-believe neighborhood with tenderness, consideration, respect, patience, and empathy, and that’s something that could rightly be called radical or even revolutionary, in a period mired in discord. Kindness was at the root of all he did and said.

[King] Manuel praised his admiral in unstinting words that redounded to his own credit. Vasco da Gama had outmatched the ancients, he rhapsodized. He had attacked “the Moors from Mequa, enemies of our Holy Catholic Faith,” he had made solemn treaties with two Indian kings, and he had brought his fleet safely home, “well-laden and with great riches.” As for the gold from Kilwa, Manuel had it melted down and made into a glittering monstrance for the vast monastery church that was rising at Belém, its lavish detailing a candy store of African carvings and Eastern marvels, proof in soaring stone of Portugal’s new power and the profit from spices.

As a mark of how strongly the king had sided with the Europeans—if not of Gama’s confidence in the attractions of his faith—the factor was explicitly given the authority to deal as he saw fit with any Christian who defected to Islam. This was no mere trade treaty: it established Europe’s first Indian colony, and in theory at least it made India’s Christians subjects of the Portuguese crown. For the raja, at the ostensibly low cost of a few words it gave the Europeans a vested interest in aggrandizing his power. The cost would soon turn out to be a great deal higher: the agreement dangerously trespassed on the rights of his neighboring rulers.

Ruscism is worse than fascism, nazism and racism, worse than all misanthropic ideologies... Ichkeria has curbed (Russia's) appetite, but it has not stopped. There will be carnage in Crimea. Ukraine will still clash with Russia in irreconcilable circumstances. As long as Ruscism exists, it will never give up its ambitions. They want to take over Belarus, Ukraine, under the "Slavic" brand, just like in the old days. Now nobody wants to ally with Russia, not militarily, politically, economically, or even trade-wise. Russia is essentially a racketeer. By threats, tanks, and armadas it extorts money for itself. And now it threatens to give nuclear technology to Iran. And if the civilized world does not want this (to suffer), says - give us money to make up for this profit. This is what is called racketeering.

Whatever changes await us in the future, they are likely to involve a fraternal struggle within a single civilization rather than a clash between alien civilizations. The big challenges of the twenty-first century will be global in nature. What will happen when climate change triggers ecological catastrophes? What will happen when computers outperform humans in more and more tasks, and replace them in an increasing number of jobs? What will happen when biotechnology enables us to upgrade humans and extend life spans? No doubt we will have huge arguments and bitter conflicts over these questions. But these arguments and conflicts are unlikely to isolate us from one another. Just the opposite. They will make us ever more interdependent. Though humankind is very far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a single rowdy global civilization.

Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale. Submission is not the story some expected of an armed coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. At one level it is simply about a man who through suffering and indifference finds himself slouching toward Mecca. At another level, though, it is about a civilization that after centuries of a steady, almost imperceptible sapping of inner conviction finds itself doing the same thing. The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemmour’s Le Suicide français is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever.

The conjunction of the 'straightest', most austere product of the Northern hemisphere—the presbyterian, the Anglo-Saxon, the quintessential hyperborean, in his pride and his theology—and the most primitive, regressive, impotent and also the most unselfconscious element that the Antipodes concealed under the sun: the Aboriginals. The clash resulted in the quasi-total extermination of the Antipodean, but the Southern hemisphere has not perhaps pronounced its last word yet. The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us—the virus of origins.

Acting on Gama’s intelligence, Cabral had discovered two notable African ports that his predecessor had bypassed—Sofala, the conduit for much of West Africa’s gold, and Kilwa, the island capital of a dynasty of sultans that had long dominated the Swahili Coast. He had been welcomed with marked friendliness by the chastened ruler of Mozambique, and the sultan of Malindi had been his usual hospitable self. He had made contact with Cannanore and Cochin, two busy Indian ports whose kings were on bad terms with the Zamorin. He had loaded his ships with spices in both cities, and he had left a party of men at Cochin to establish a factory. The vessel that had disappeared in the Indian Ocean finally resurfaced with the news that it had stumbled across Madagascar. Not least, the island Cabral had thought he had discovered on his outward journey turned out to be Brazil, and moreover, the coast was well to the east of the demarcation line established at Tordesillas. By complete accident Cabral had pulled off a historic first: his ships had touched four continents.

Acting on Gama’s intelligence, Cabral had discovered two notable African ports that his predecessor had bypassed—Sofala, the conduit for much of West Africa’s gold, and Kilwa, the island capital of a dynasty of sultans that had long dominated the Swahili Coast. He had been welcomed with marked friendliness by the chastened ruler of Mozambique, and the sultan of Malindi had been his usual hospitable self. He had made contact with Cannanore and Cochin, two busy Indian ports whose kings were on bad terms with the Zamorin. He had loaded his ships with spices in both cities, and he had left a party of men at Cochin to establish a factory. The vessel that had disappeared in the Indian Ocean finally resurfaced with the news that it had stumbled across Madagascar. Not least, the island Cabral had thought he had discovered on his outward journey turned out to be Brazil, and moreover, the coast was well to the east of the demarcation line established at Tordesillas. By complete accident Cabral had pulled off a historic first: his ships had touched four continents.

My 1979 Top 40 In no particular order, this is the forty-track rotation I listened to when I was researching, prepping and writing 1979. They were all released in the late 1970s, though not all in 1979 itself. But then, like Allie, we all listen to tunes from our past . . . I hope it gets you in the mood for reading! ‘Picture This’ – Blondie ‘Lovely Day’ – Bill Withers ‘Automatic Lover’ – Dee D. Jackson ‘Brass in Pocket’ – The Pretenders ‘It’s a Heartache’ – Bonnie Tyler ‘Wild West Hero’ – Electric Light Orchestra ‘Because the Night’ – Patti Smith ‘Into the Valley’ – The Skids ‘YMCA’ – Village People ‘Like Clockwork’ – Boomtown Rats ‘Stayin’ Alive’ – Bee Gees ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ – Althea & Donna ‘No More Heroes’ – The Stranglers ‘Take a Chance on Me’ – Abba ‘Werewolves of London’ – Warren Zevon ‘Psycho Killer’ – Talking Heads ‘Kiss You All Over’ – Exile ‘Top of the Pops’ – Rezillos ‘Heroes’ – David Bowie ‘Don’t Hang Up’ – 10cc ‘English Civil War’ – The Clash ‘2-4-6-8-Motorway’ – Tom Robinson Band ‘Rebel Rebel’ – David Bowie ‘Glad to be Gay’ – Tom Robinson Band

Before they came in Lee had a couple of adventures. He first clashed with a sergeant of a Mississippi regiment who wandered over the wet field. Lee called out sharply: "What are you doing here, sir, away from your command?" "That's none of your business," the ragged soldier said. "You are a straggler, sire, and deserve the severest punishment." The sergeant shouted in rage, "It is a lie, sir. I only left my regiment a few minutes ago to hunt me a pair of shoes. I went through all the fight yesterday, and that's more than you can say; for where were you yesterday when General Stuart wanted your cavalry to charge the Yankees after we put 'em to running? You were lying back in the pine thickets and couldn't be found; but today, when there's no danger, you come out and charge other men with straggling." Lee laughed and rode off. Behind him an officer baited the sergeant, who thought he had been talking with a "cowardly Virginia cavalryman". "No, sir, that was General Lee." "Ho-o-what? General Lee, you say?" "Yes." "Scissors to grind, I'm a goner." The sergeant tore out of sight along the muddy road.

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—where the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forgot all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling fiery visitations. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under the thunder of relenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which is something else than a private consolation.

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

Their case was summed up by British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind, who, in November 1994, argued the need for “an Atlantic Community,” resting on four pillars: defense and security embodied in NATO; “shared belief in the rule of law and parliamentary democracy”; “liberal capitalism and free trade”; and “the shared European cultural heritage emanating from Greece and Rome through the Renaissance to the shared values, beliefs and civilization of our own century.

Given this American interest, how might war between the United States and China develop? Assume the year is 2010. American troops are out of Korea, which has been reunified, and the United States has a greatly reduced military presence in Japan. Taiwan and mainland China have reached an accommodation in which Taiwan continues to have most of its de facto independence but explicitly acknowledges Beijing’s suzerainty and with China’s sponsorship has been admitted to the United Nations on the model of Ukraine and Belorussia in 1946. The development of the oil resources in the South China Sea has proceeded apace, largely under Chinese auspices but with some areas under Vietnamese control being developed by American companies. Its confidence boosted by its new power projection capabilities, China announces that it will establish its full control of the entire sea, over all of which it has always claimed sovereignty. The Vietnamese resist and fighting occurs between Chinese and Vietnamese warships. The Chinese, eager to revenge their 1979 humiliation, invade Vietnam. The Vietnamese appeal for American assistance. The Chinese warn the United States to stay out. Japan and the other nations in Asia dither. The United States says it cannot accept Chinese conquest of Vietnam, calls for economic sanctions against China, and dispatches one of its few remaining carrier task forces to the South China Sea. The Chinese denounce this as a violation of Chinese territorial waters and launch air strikes against the task force. Efforts by the U.N. secretary general and the Japanese prime minister to negotiate a cease-fire fail, and the fighting spreads elsewhere in East Asia. Japan prohibits the use of U.S. bases in Japan for action against China, the United States ignores that prohibition, and Japan announces its neutrality and quarantines the bases. Chinese submarines and land-based aircraft operating from both Taiwan and the mainland impose serious damage on U.S. ships and facilities in East Asia. Meanwhile Chinese ground forces enter Hanoi and occupy large portions of Vietnam.

With the end of the Cold War, China’s efforts to establish more friendly relations with its neighbors extended to India and tensions between the two lessened. This trend, however, is unlikely to continue for long. China has actively involved itself in South Asian politics and presumably will continue to do so: maintaining a close relation with Pakistan, strengthening Pakistan’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities, and courting Myanmar with economic assistance, investment, and military aid, while possibly developing naval facilities there. Chinese power is expanding at the moment; India’s power could grow substantially in the early twenty-first century. Conflict seems highly probable. “The underlying power rivalry between the two Asian giants, and their self-images as natural great powers and centers of civilization and culture,” one analyst has observed, “will continue to drive them to support different countries and causes. India will strive to emerge, not only as an independent power center in the multipolar world, but as a counterweight to Chinese power and influence.”48

For those who fought the Soviets, however, the Afghan War was something else. It was “the first successful resistance to a foreign power,” one Western scholar observed,2 “which was not based on either nationalist or socialist principles” but instead on Islamic principles, which was waged as a jihad, and which gave a tremendous boost to Islamic self-confidence and power. Its impact on the Islamic world was, in effect, comparable to the impact which the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 had on the Oriental world. What the West sees as a victory for the Free World, Muslims see as a victory for Islam.

Many, perhaps most, Americans,” one observer commented in 1994, “still see their nation as a European settled country, whose laws are an inheritance from England, whose language is (and should remain) English, whose institutions and public buildings find inspiration in Western classical norms, whose religion has Judeo-Christian roots, and whose greatness initially arose from the Protestant work ethic.

The dynamism of Islam is the ongoing source of many relatively small fault line wars; the rise of China is the potential source of a big intercivilizational war of core states.

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.

The United States would be a more willing container of China, but in the mid-1990s it is unclear how far it will go to contest an assertion of Chinese control over the South China Sea.

Like the Chinese, the Japanese see international politics as hierarchical because their domestic politics are.

When asked in 1994, for instance, which nation would have the greatest influence in Asia in the twenty-first century, 44 percent of the Japanese public said China, 30 percent said the United States, and only 16 percent said Japan.42 Japan, as one high Japanese official predicted in 1995, will have the “discipline” to adapt to the rise of China. He then asked whether the United States would. His initial proposition is plausible; the answer to his subsequent question is uncertain.

Mapmaking was further complicated when in November 1917, Foreign Secretary Balfour sent Baron Lionel Rothschild a public letter declaring that Britain would “favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the soul’s love of beauty and perfection and its relentless aspiration for knowledge of God and therefore of ourselves.

Erasmus had no intention of becoming a martyr. In the end, he preferred to work within the boundaries of the Church, not outside them. Despite their mutual antipathy toward the Aristotle of the scholastics, Luther’s opposition ran far deeper. It hinged on an issue that had separated Boethius and Saint Augustine at the onset of the Middle Ages. It had at its heart the clash between Plato and Aristotle on free will.

The men on the plain at Shinar make a technological discovery... As after so many other technological advances, they immediately conclude that they now have the power of gods. They are no longer subject to nature. They have become its masters. They will storm the heavens. Their man-made environment - the city with its ziggurat or artificial mountain - will replicate the structure of the cosmos, but here they will rule, not God. It is a supreme act of hubris, committed time and again in history - from the Sumerian city-states, to Plato's Republic, to empires, ancient and modern, to the Soviet Union. It is the attempt to impose a man-made unity on divinely created diversity. That is what is wrong with universalism.

Pray for those who have allowed themselves to be whisked away/whittled away, their freedoms denied them, their hopes dashed. “Pray for those who have lost their voice amidst the clashing of ideologies. “Pray for everyone who has seen this season (riots in England, flash mobs here) of unrest and violence. “Pray for the children who will grow up with this fighting. “Pray for those who are tiny and weak. “Pray for those who do not know the heavens above their heads, who think this earth is the be all and end all of civilization. They aren’t following the right path; they are leaderless. “There are now burdens which must be carried, which must be lifted and carried. They are encumbered in the extreme, and it will only get worse and more wearisome. “Pray for the fathers who have seen their children taken away from them as you have. “Pray for the children living without a stable home, and what it will do to them. “Pray for the (I could see a fountain gushing up) outpouring of life that is stilled/corked. (I saw parched desert rocks). Moses of old could strike the rock and bring forth water; you can merely speak to the rock and produce the desired effect. Use your voice to water the land with freedom and dignity and hope, which springs eternal.

Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.

Fifty Best Rock Documentaries Chicago Blues (1972) B. B. King: The Life of Riley (2014) Devil at the Crossroads (2019) BBC: Dancing in the Street: Whole Lotta Shakin’ (1996) BBC: Story of American Folk Music (2014) The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time! (1982) PBS: The March on Washington (2013) BBC: Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice (2005) The Wrecking Crew (2008) What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964) BBC: Blues Britannia (2009) Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965 (2012) Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967) BBC: The Motown Invasion (2011) Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil (1968) BBC: Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (2017) Gimme Shelter (1970) Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017) Cocksucker Blues (1972) John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band: Sweet Toronto (1971) John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (2018) Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” Album (2000) Echo in the Canyon (2018) BBC: Prog Rock Britannia (2009) BBC: Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles (2007) The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash (2016) BBC: Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga (2012) Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (2010) BBC: Kings of Glam (2006) Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) New York Dolls: All Dolled Up (2005) End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2004) Fillmore: The Last Days (1972) Gimme Danger: The Stooges (2016) George Clinton: The Mothership Connection (1998) Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1997) The Who: The Kids Are Alright (1979) The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77 (2015) The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) U2: Rattle and Hum (1988) Neil Young: Year of the Horse (1997) Ginger Baker: Beware of Mr. Baker (2012) AC/DC: Dirty Deeds (2012) Grateful Dead: Long, Strange Trip (2017) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) Hip-Hop Evolution (2016) Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018) David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) Zappa (2020) Summer of Soul (2021)

I look at the augusteum and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all it is merely this world that is chaotic b ringing changes to us all threat nobody could have anticipated. The augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who i am what i represent whom i belong to or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday i might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough but tomorrow i could be a firework's depository, even in the eternal city says the silent augusteum . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation. pizzaeria da michele Passato remoto In her world the roman forum is not remote nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as i am. The bhagavata Gita that ancient Indian yogic test says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now i have started living my own life, perfected clumsy as it may look it is resembling me now thoroughly. It was in a bathtub back in new York reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary that i first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits, and I was so unrecognizable to myself that i probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But i felt a glimmer of happiness when i started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grip onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face first out of the dirt this is not selfishness but obligation you were given life it is your duty and also your entitlement as a human being to find somehtign beautiful within life no mattter how slight But i do know that i have collected me of late through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures into somebody much more intact . I have e put on weight I exist more now than i did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when i arrived here. And i will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person the magnification of one life is indeed an act of worth in this world, Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody s but my own . Hatha yoga one limb of the philosophy the ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation, Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation through scholarly study. The yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition which i[m going to very simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Taoists call it imbalance Buddhism calls it ignorance Islam blames our misery on rebellion against god and the jedio Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin, Graduands say that unhappiness is that inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization needs and my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it desire is the design flaw the yogis however say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity we're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals alone with our fears and flaws an d resentment sand mortality we wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature, We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character we don't realize that somewhere within us all there does exist a supreme self is our true identity universal and divine . you bear God within your poor wretch and know it not.

In normal love the emphasis was not on the sexual organs. The relationship was a clash or a union of personalities laid bare by sexual passion. Between two men it consists of each using the utmost force of his personality to gain access to the sexual organs of the other.

When comparing the drab, modern, mechanistic world in which humans are the only intelligent agents to a world of paganism, charged with spirituality, under pressure, as it were, threatening to erupt out of the ground with irrational and exuberant joy, Lewis leaned toward the pagan. Contrast such premodern visions of exuberant joy with how Lewis described the dolorous piety of modern religion, what he called a “minimal religion” which has “nothing that can convince, convert, or (in the higher sense) console: nothing, therefore, which can restore vitality to our civilization. It is not costly enough.”2 It is, seemingly, for this reason that Bacchus keeps making unexpected appearances throughout the Narnia books.3 Bacchus is the liberator, the joy-bringer, the mirth-maker, and he shatters our frigid paradigms of religion when they become nothing more than being nice and respectable and socially responsible: “Bacchus and the Maenads—his fierce, madcap girls—and Silenus were still with them. . . . Everyone was awake, everyone was laughing, flutes were playing, cymbals clashing. Animals . . . were crowding upon them from every direction.

Having children is a ruinous decision. It's like having stocks, when they lose their value you won't find a buyer. No one listens to the Pope and the President of the Republic, when they exhort Italians to have children, and that's because the cost is high, the risks immense, and the benefits few.

each of us has a place where he feels comfortable.

I ask as loud as I can, from this hole that has a stink to take your breath away: who possesses the truth? Rather, what is the truth? Is the truth spoken with words? Parviz spoke his truth with his mouth sewed up: he spoke with his silence.

Is the truth a remedy that cures our ills or a poison that slowly kills us?

The problem is, this is Italy: we reward the incompetent and despise the good!

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine?

Once I heard an old woman in Mali utter words that I've treasured like rare pearls: "Never trust a guide to the Sahara. He is like Satan, cursed forever, because the Sahara doesn't like arrogance. Those who claim to know it must expect the inevitable punishment, death from thirst. Modesty is the only language the Sahara understands." A few years ago I met an Icelandic tourist who told me something extraordinary: that fishermen in the region where he lives don't know how to swim, because the safety of a shipwrecked man depends not on knowing how to swim but on obedience, submission, total resignation to the sea. There is no difference between the sea and the Sahara.

The nightmare is the window through which the past enters like a thief, as a French writer says.

The life of Italian immigrants in the past closely resembles the life of the immigrants arriving in Italy today. Throughout history, immigrants have always been the same. All that changes is their language, their religion, and the color of their skin.

This morning I read an article by the philosopher Karl Popper on the influence of television in our daily lives. Popper maintains that TV has become a member of the family, and that its voice is the most listened to in the whole family. Maria Cristina said to me one day, “TV is my new family.

I thought all day about racists who refuse to smile and I realized that Iqbal has made an important discovery. The racist’s problem is not with others but with himself. I would go further: he doesn’t smile at his fellow-man because he doesn’t know how to smile at himself. The Arab proverb that says “He who has nothing gives nothing” is very true.

Ahead is the Manassas National Battlefield Park, the site of the Civil War’s first major clash between the North and South.

good way to measure the power of a theory is to look at the scale and intensity and quality of the debate it provokes; on those grounds, “Clash” is one of the most powerful theoretical contributions in recent generations, and we are proud to have been present at its creation.

حدود الإسلام دموية ... وكذلك الأحشاء

The battle between the North and South was also a clash of civilizations and economic destinies. Industrial forces conquered agrarian society, opening the door for massive, sweeping projects that saw railroads crisscross the continent, telegraph wires connect distant localities, and buildings dot the skylines of major cities. Wealth in the form of tax dollars would be redistributed from the population via the federal government to businesses and capitalists who made this transformation possible, establishing new, ultra-rich classes of citizens and corporations that came to overshadow government and dominate most facets of society.

real war,” as Walt Whitman put it, did not begin until July 21, 1861, a lovely but hot Sunday when Union and Confederate forces clashed at Bull Run. Edmund Ruffin joined the fray, solemnly riding into battle on the barrel of a cannon. At

Even in the few cases that would vaguely fit the definition of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Bosnia and Kosovo, southern Sudan), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible.

Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion.” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage, and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.

These three Rs—revenue, restriction, and reciprocity—have been the main purposes of US trade policy. While all three have been important throughout history, US trade policy can be divided into three eras in which one of them has taken priority. In the first era, from the establishment of the federal government until the Civil War, revenue was the key objective of trade policy. In the second era, from the Civil War until the Great Depression, the restriction of imports to protect domestic producers was the primary goal of trade policy. In the third era, from the Great Depression to the present, reciprocal trade agreements to reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade have been the main priority.

Mubarak said: I talk to you during critical times that are testing Egypt and its people which could sweep them into the unknown … Those protests were transformed from a noble and civilized phenomenon of practicing freedom of expression to unfortunate clashes, mobilized and controlled by political forces that wanted to escalate and worsen the situation. Leaders of government or corporate leaders finding themselves in such crisis typically employ tactics as they seek to, “distance themselves from their illegitimate behaviours and then create identifications with the public values they are reputed to have violated

I submit to you for your consideration the idea that the most enduring engagement of a people with the world is in the realm of ideas and the idea we must engage the world through is the “idea of India”—the idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.The idea that even as nations may clash, cultures and civilizations can coexist.

political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic

In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans—founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person).

It may sound exaggerated to say that the clash of civilizations and cultures as what we're witnessing in Europe between muslims and christians is necessary, but the alternative, an extremely arrogant and suppressive Europe, would eventually self-destroy itself, as it nearly did several times in the past centuries. The forced discipline on Europeans is violent for the present generation, unaware of its moral weaknesses and delusional supremacy, but necessary for future generations, that need to witness a more peaceful world, one where racism doesn't dictate their opportunities in life. And that, at present moment, is still a dream in most European countries, that despite their history, show such a level of aggression and segregation, that make one of darker skin wonder if slavery has not yet ended.

the abandoning of ideological conviction – the modern surrogate for religious belief – or us-versus-them thinking won’t be easy. The experts on Islam who opened for business on 9/11 peddle their wares more feverishly after every terrorist attack, helped by clash-of-civilization theorists and other intellectual robots of the Cold War who were programmed to think in binary oppositions (free versus unfree world, the West versus Islam) and to limit their lexicon to words such as ‘ideology’, ‘threat’ and ‘generational struggle’.

From the Crusades to the Holocaust to the Cold War to the current “clash of civilizations,” the demonization of “the other” has played a central and nefarious role in justifying the most evil human enterprises. Instead of finding common ground with those of different beliefs, backgrounds, and cultures than ourselves, we crow these days about our American “exceptionalism” and seek to impose our values on those who reject them. This is the pathway to permanent war—a path that has led to enormous wealth and power for the few, and deepening misery for the rest of humanity.

Because history always teaches us that there will always be another demonized minority group who will become “the other” tomorrow. Our human race seems tragically doomed to keep finding scapegoat minorities on whom the majority can vent its fears and frustrations. This demonization creates an inevitable cycle of bloodshed and revenge. But as the means of violence and weapons of destruction become increasingly terrifying, we must find our common humanity before we annihilate ourselves into collective oblivion. Because there is no “Us versus Them” in our increasingly shrinking global village. There is only “Us.” As my friend Leon told me that day in Aspen: “This is not a clash of civilizations … because every civilization contains the clash within itself.

Africa wants to kick down our door, and Brussels is not defending us. Europe is under invasion already, and they are simply wringing their hands.

Those who do no halt mass migration are lost: slowly but surely they are consumed.

When a crowd rushes into your house without declaring its intention, it is, by definition, an invasion.

If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate.

Only after the concept of knowledge has been based on an ontological relation [*Seinsverhältnis*] can we work out the particular kind of being from which the principle of immanence-to-consciousness (the starting point of Idealism and Critical Realism) mistakenly proceeds as though from a primary insight. This is the being of "being-conscious" [*Bewusst-Seins*]. All being-conscious must first of all be brought under the higher concept of ideal being, or, at all events, that of irreal being. The mental item which presents itself in the experiences of consciousness may be real; being-conscious itself never is. However, the concept of consciousness is derivative in not only this sense. Consciousness also presupposes the concept of knowledge. Nothing is more misleading than to proceed in the opposite direction and define knowledge itself as simply a particular "content of consciousness," as we see if we oppose, to the particular kind of knowing and having-known which we call consciousness, another kind of knowledge which precedes it and includes no form of being-conscious. We will call this knowledge *ecstatic* [*ekstatische*] knowledge. It is found quite clearly in animals, primitive people, children, and, further, in certain pathological and other abnormal and supra-normal states (e.g., in recovering from the effects of a drug). I have said elsewhere that the animal never relates to its environment as to an object but only *lives in it* [*es lebe nur "in sie hinein*"]. Its conduct with respect to the external world depends upon whether the latter satisfies its instinctive drives or denies them satisfaction. The animal experiences the surrounding world as resistances of various types. Hence, it is absolutely necessary to contest the principle (in Descartes, Franz Brentano, *et al*.) that every mental function and act is accompanied by an immediate knowledge of it. An even more highly contestable principle is that a relation to the self is an essential condition of all processes of knowledge. It is difficult to reproduce purely ecstatic knowledge in mature, civilized men, whether in memory, reverie, perception, thought, or empathetic identification with things, animals, or men; nonetheless, there is no doubt that in every perception and presentation of things and events we think that we grasp *the things-themselves*, not mere "images" of them or representatives of some sort. Knowledge first becomes conscious knowledge [*Bewusst-sein*], that is, comes out of its original ecstatic form of simply "having" things, in which there is no knowledge of the having or of that through which and in which it is had, when the act of being thrown back on the self (probably only possible for men) comes into play. This act grows out of conspicuous resistances, clashes, and oppositions―in sum, out of pronounced suffering. It is the *actus re-flexivus* in which knowledge of the knowledge of things is added to the knowledge of things. Furthermore, in this act we come to know the kind of knowledge we have, for example, memory, ideation, and perception, and finally, beyond even these, we come to have a knowledge of the relation of the act performed to the self, to the knower. With respect to any specific relation to the self, this last knowledge, so-called conscious self-knowledge, comes only after knowledge about the act. Kant's principle that an "I think" must be *able* to accompany all a man's thoughts may be correct. That it in fact always accompanies them is nevertheless undoubtedly false. However, the kind of being (indeed, of ideal being) which contents possess when they are reflexively *had* in their givenness in conscious acts―when, therefore, they become reflexive―is the being of being-consciously-known." from_Idealism and Realism_

To Tarzan of the Apes the expedition was in the nature of a holiday outing. His civilization was at best but an outward veneer which he gladly peeled off with his uncomfortable European clothes whenever any reasonable pretext presented itself. It was a woman's love which kept Tarzan even to the semblance of civilization—a condition for which familiarity had bred contempt. He hated the shams and the hypocrisies of it and with the clear vision of an unspoiled mind he had penetrated to the rotten core of the heart of the thing—the cowardly greed for peace and ease and the safe-guarding of property rights. That the fine things of life—art, music and literature—had thriven upon such enervating ideals he strenuously denied, insisting, rather, that they had endured in spite of civilization. "Show me the fat, opulent coward," he was wont to say, "who ever originated a beautiful ideal. In the clash of arms, in the battle for survival, amid hunger and death and danger, in the face of God as manifested in the display of Nature's most terrific forces, is born all that is finest and best in the human heart and mind." And so Tarzan always came back to Nature in the

No one wants to suffer. But much as we would all like to live a totally happy life, suffering is an inescapable fact of our human existence. The observation that ‘Man is born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward’ may not have been much consolation to Job but, nevertheless, remains an uncomfortable truth. Generally speaking, suffering arises through our encounters with problems and difficulties; this is why much of our time is spent trying to avoid them, even though they are inherent in life. In trying to avoid problems, however, we are often simply putting off the inevitable to a future date, by which time the trouble has usually grown much more difficult to resolve. Personal relationships are a good example of this. The failure to tackle a problem between two people — a clash of desires, for instance – usually for fear of not knowing what the consequences will be, or perhaps simply because of a dislike of conflict, can very easily lead to a build-up of resentments which, when finally expressed, can be immensely destructive. The story of the ‘mild-mannered’ civil servant who, in 1987, was jailed for strangling his wife after twenty-six years of marriage, ostensibly because she simply moved his favourite mustard from its usual place at the dinner table, is an extreme, but true, example of this.

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This battle, this war, between us . . . this ‘clash of civilizations,’ as your people like to call it. It’s a long-term fight. It’s not about who’s got the biggest gun. It’s not about landing one big killer punch. It’s about attrition. It’s about killing the body slowly, with lots of well-placed jabs. It’s about relentlessly chipping away at the soul of your enemy with every opportunity you get.

For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West—the ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations. From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting—sometimes fanatically—to the “fundamentals” of their faith.

Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs.

With the coming of spring they would start back to the highlands, their flocks heavy with fat and wool; the caravans loaded with food and provisions purchased out of the proceeds from work and trading; men, women, and children displaying bits of finery they had picked up in the plains. This way of life had endured for centuries, but it would not last forever. It constituted defiance to certain concepts, which the world was beginning to associate with civilization itself. Concepts such as statehood, citizenship, undivided loyalty to one state, settled life as opposed to nomadic life, and the writ of the state as opposed to tribal discipline. The pressures were inexorable. One set of values, one way of life, had to die. In this clash, the state, as always, proved stronger than the individual. The new way of life triumphed over the old. The clash came about first in Soviet Russia. After a few years, the nomad died in both China and Iran.

I remain confident that if faced with such a threat, the West will remember its twenty-five hundred years of tradition, much to the detriment of any possible foe. Having said that, we must all hope our leaders are wise enough to forestall any threat of this magnitude before it manifests itself. Because the Western way of war is brutal. If it is ever again unleashed in all its decisive barbarity, it will be many generations before our enemies recover.

And it is plain enough, not from this instance only, but from many everywhere, that freedom is an excellent thing since even the Athenians, who, while they continued under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all. These things show that, while undergoing oppression, they let themselves be beaten, since then they worked for a master; but so soon as they got their freedom, each man was eager to do the best he could for himself.2 Despite Herodotus’s

If the first decade of the 21st century can be summarized in one scene, It will definitely be the collision of the two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (New York) September 11, 2001, the scene represents the collision of the «mentality of the 7th century» that uses the «products of modernity» to attack modernity itself, in the 21st century within the heart of the city that is the capital of the modern world. لو ممكن تلخيص العقد الأول من القرن الحادي و العشرين في مشهد واحد، هيبقى بكل تأكيد مشهد اصطدام الطائرتين ببرجي مركز التجارة العالمي في (نيويورك) 11 سبتمبر 2001، مشهد يمثل تصادم عقلية القرن السابع التي تستخدم منتجات الحداثة للهجوم عليها مع القرن الحادي و العشرين في قلب مدينة هي عاصمة العالم المعاصر.

Най-очевидната, най-натрапчивата и най-сериозната причина за глобалното религиозно възраждане е тъкмо тази, за която се предполага, че е причинила смъртта на религията: процесите на социална, икономическа и културна модернизация, които заливат света през втората половина на XX в. Рушат се дълговечни извори на идентичност и системи на авторитет. Хората се преместват от селата към градовете, откъснат се от корените си и започват нова работа или остават безработни. Те влизат във взаимодействие с голям брой непознати и встъпват в нови кръгове. Те се нуждаят от нови източници на идентичност, от нови форми на стабилна общност и от нова система от морални принципи, които да им дадат усещане за смисъл и за цел. Религията, както традиционната, така и фундаменталистката, отговаря на тези нужди. ............................................ Хората не живеят само с разума си. Те не могат да преценяват и да действат рационално, преследвайки интересите cи, ако не се стремят да определят собственото Аз. Политиката на интересите предполага идентичност. Във времена на бърза социална промяна вече изградените идентичности се paзпадат, Азът трябва да се предефинира и да се създаде нова идентичност.За хора, изправени пред необходимостта да oпределят „Кой съм аз?“, „Къде ми е мястото?“, религията предлага непоклатими отговори, а религиозните групи дават възможност на малките социални общности да получат компенсация за загубеното от урбанизацията. Както пише Хасан ал-Тураби, всички религии предоставят на „хората усещане за идентичност и перспектива в живота“. В този процес xopата преоткриват себе си ил

Участниците в процеса на религиозно възраждане произхождат от всички слоеве на обществото, но най-вече от две категории, като и двете са градски и мобилни. Току-що преселилите се мигранти в градовете обикновено се нуждаят от емоционална, социална и материална подкрепа и ръководство, неща, които религиозните групи осигуряват в много по-голяма степен от каквато и да била друга група. Както отбелязва Режи Дебре, за тях „религията не е опиум за народа, а витамин за слабите“[38]. Другата основна категория е новата средна класа, олицетворяваща посочения от Дор „феномен на индигенизация при второто поколение“. Активистите в ислямските фундаменталистки групи, изтъква Кепел, не са „застаряващи консерватори или неграмотни селяни“. Както при другите религии, при мюсюлманите религиозното възраждане е градски феномен и то привлича хора, които имат модерна ориентация, които са добре образовани и са избрали пътя на професионална кариера на държавници или на бизнесмени.[39] При мюсюлманите религиозни са младите, докато родителите им имат светски разбирания. Същото е и случаят с индуизма, където лидерите на възродителните движения също идват от индигенизираното второ поколение и чето са „преуспяващи бизнесмени и администратори“, които индийската преса нарича „скупита“, т. е. облечени в шафранени одежди юпита. В началото на 90-те години техните привърженици са предимно „хора от солидната средна класа — търговци, счетоводители, адвокати и инженери“, както и от „висшите държавни чиновници, интелектуалците и журналистите“[40]. В Южна Корея хора от същия тип изпълват католическите и презвитерианските църкви през 60-те и 70-те години.