[Previous entry: "The racial pacification bargain"] [Next entry: "Blacks were not injected with Syphilis"]

03/25/2008: "Liberalism is the West's death urge"

The strength of the West measured in terms of freedom -- of Prometheus unbound and its creative spirit unleashed soaring upwards despite risks -- resides in its assimilative capacity and openness to share its freedom with those beyond its cultural boundaries seeking the same.

Muggeridge again: "Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite."

In every culture there are to be found some dissidents or skeptics questioning its legitimacy and moral authority as those in the former Soviet Union -- Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others not as well known -- did. They exposed the lies of a system that rationalized the organized effort of tyranny to extinguish freedom, and their sacrifice eventually contributed to its demise.

But the oddity about skeptics in the West, as Muggeridge wrote about them and their liberalism, is the death wish to undo a culture where freedom, having sunk deep roots, thrives. They would replace this culture with a pale shadow of one negating all that is noble, life affirming, uplifting and founded on the values celebrated by the Christian church.

[ Liberalism is a death wish. Let's stop growing, compliment ourselves, and make ourselves feel better for being nice to the less fortunate. But whatever we do, let us not strive for grand goals; they might inconvenience us. ]

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2008/03/22/5073656-sun.php