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The New Criterion
"September 11, 2001 was a call to moral seriousness. We know now what is at stake."
"Around the world, there are certain societies that function and those that don’t. The ones that work have certain things in common. The ones that don’t reject some or all of those features, disdaining explicitly the rule of law, property rights, free expression, and representative government, thereby additionally depressing economic activity, technological innovation, foreign investment, education, and the arts. ... it is in the nature of multicultural man, generous to a fault, to regard these aberrations as just another “alternative lifestyle”— lesbianism, vegetarianism, totalitarianism, whatever."
" ... in the immediate aftermath of September 11, it quickly became clear that there was no serious antiwar movement—just a few aging Ivy League slogan-parroters whose tired tropes failed to spark even on campus. ... the inability of the elites to rouse the masses to their tattered banner speaks well for Tennyson’s 'common sense of most,' at least in the United States. Not for the first time, one appreciates the importance of the popular will as a brake on the inclinations of the elite."
"Given the choice between its booming westernized economy or a blood-soaked wasteland, Yugoslavia eagerly chose the latter. The critical soundtrack is not Britney, but the deeper rhythms of the culture playing underneath. ... The Durban Syndrome—the vague sense that the West’s success must somehow be responsible for the rest’s failure—is a far slyer virus than the toxic effusions of the Chomsky-Sontag set, and it has seeped far deeper into the cultural bloodstream. At its most benign, Durban Syndrome manifests itself in a desire not to offend others if one can offend one’s own instead."
"This is what we’re fighting for—the right not to tolerate any intolerance of our tolerance. ... The one identity we’re not encouraged to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as citizens of a very particular kind of society, built on the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression, and the universal franchise. I am Western, hear me apologize!"
" ... generally, around the world, the likelihood of living your life unmolested by the arbitrary cruelties of government is inversely proportional to how far the state departs from Anglo-American theories of liberty. ... Of the world’s fifty most free nations, half were once ruled by Britain. That’s the sort of thing most countries would boast about, not teach in schools as a shameful legacy of oppression."
"Multiculturalism was invented to make amends for “cultural imperialism,” for the idea that the West in taking its ideas to the world had somehow obliterated all the other cultures out there. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. ... while it’s not as dramatic as blowing statues sky- high, when Congress is willing to collude in a fiction [the Iroquois Confederation] about the foundation of America’s institutions, it’s embarking on the same process, removing some of those building blocks from our civilization. Once begun, selective demolition is hard to control." [deconstruction]
" ... every sermon on the social issues of the day reached a climax with the words, 'We are all guilty!' Riddled with self- doubt and an enthusiastic pioneer of the peculiar masochism that now afflicts the West, the Anglican Church has for years enjoyed the strange frisson of moral superiority that comes from blanket advertising of one’s own failures. It was surely only a matter of time before some litigious types took them at their own estimation. ... 'Cultural genocide' is similar to traditional forms of genocide—such as being herded into ovens or hacked to pieces with machetes—but with the happy benefit, from the plaintiffs’ point of view, that you personally don’t have to be killed in order to have a case. All you need are blurry accusations, historical resentments, and a hefty dose of false-memory syndrome. Against craven clerics like the Anglican Church, that’s more than enough."
"No civilized society legislates retrospectively: if you pass a seatbelt law in 1990, you don’t prosecute people who were driving without them in 1980. Likewise, we should not sue the past for noncompliance with the orthodoxies of the present. We are the accumulations of our past, in its wisdom and folly, and to repudiate it is a totalitarian act, never more explicitly captured than in Pol Pot’s proclamation of 'Year Zero.' The reason why the American Revolution succeeded and the French, Russian, and almost all others failed is precisely because it resisted the 'Year Zero' approach. ... As long as we are ashamed of ourselves, there’ll always be something to apologize for."
"Until Islamic fundamentalism came along, all the noisiest anti-Western ideologies were developed in the West, again mostly in Anglo-America. (Capitalism itself, as the French Eurocrats used to lecture Mrs. Thatcher, is “an Anglo-Saxon fetish.”) Whether you’re a liberal democracy or a moribund dictatorship, you’re operating to a Western template. Ever since Karl Marx sat in the Reading Room of the British Library writing Das Kapital, great Western thinkers have been obsessed with discovering the flaw in capitalism, a kind of negative Holy Grail for the knights of progressivism. For Marx, capitalism functioned only by exploiting the proletariat. But the proletariat got richer and bought homes in the suburbs. So the next generation of Marxists turned their attention to “colonialism”: capitalism functioned only by looting the West’s imperial possessions. But the West decolonized in the Fifties and Sixties, and they didn’t get any poorer, only the colonies did. So the Marxists invented “neo- colonialism”: capitalism functioned by informally exploiting the nominally independent developing world. But the dramatically differing rates at which developing economies developed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America seemed to have little to do with external forces and a lot more to do with obvious local factors."
"Like all the rest of the West’s anti-Western theorists, they don’t dispute that capitalism works but only why it works. To those of us of a less pathological bent, it seems obvious that, rather than “exploiting” people, it invites citizens to exploit their own potential."
"This then is the paradox of the most successful culture in history: the “Anglo-Saxon fetish” and its attendant liberties have enabled more people to live their lives in freedom, health, and material comfort. Yet at the same time no other culture works so hard to deny its achievements and its heritage, to insist there must be a catch, there’s gotta be an alternative. There isn’t. The Anglophone culture has succeeded because it is in its way an anti-culture—a culture of individual rights, not collective rights or group rights (which the Euro-left have always been partial to) or identity politics (in which form collective rights have made a critical beachhead here)." ... [more]
4:34:44 PM Google It! 
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