By Daniel Greenfield:
Travelers across the vast stretches of the Arabian desert have been known to get lost and in their thirst and exhaustion hallucinate oases with palm trees and flowing water. Western policymakers lost in the vast stretches of madness that define the Muslim world are even more wont to hallucinate the oasis of a moderate Islam to take refuge in.
This post contends, correctly I think, that "Moderate Islam is a mirage, a projection by desperate Westerners of their own values and culture, on an entirely different religion and culture." We do a lot of that and it is hazardous to our health and also, perhaps, to theirs. In this article I compared our conceptions of the center of the Earth to our conceptions of North Korea.
We try to analyze what happens and is likely to happen in North Korea as though we knew as much as there is to know about it. We seem to look upon it as a small state in a mid western part of the United States. It is not. Korea has a far longer history than does the United States and is extraordinarily different culturally, historically and in just about every other important respect. It is said that FDR tried to deal with Joseph Stalin before and during WWII as though Stalin were a Senator from the Georgia in the United States. He obviously knew that Stalin was not, but nevertheless treated him in many respects as though he were. Give him the equivalent of a bridge, a road and other such goodies; then he will like us and do as we demand because that’s the way politics works in the United States. Until we learn that people around the world are not necessarily the same as we are, don’t necessarily think in the same way and don’t necessarily appreciate the same things, we will continue to muck up foreign policy terribly. Our troops and those of our allies and enemies will continue to die unnecessarily, we will continue spend money that we don’t have and continue to be impoverished in the process. Are we stupid, or just mistakenly well-meaning?We can not perceive reality in the ways that North Koreans or Islamists perceive them; the cultural and religious differences are too great. We try to compensate by engaging in the fantasy that they are just about the same as we are and will react as we would. They are not and will not.
This argument is a classic ‘strawman’ argument:
“This post contends, correctly I think, that “Moderate Islam is a mirage, a projection by desperate Westerners of their own values and culture, on an entirely different religion and culture.”
One puts up a flimsy argument by imputing something stupid to your imagined opponent and then one beats it to death with ones mighty sword. It’s a waste of energy. Do something useful instead of indulging revenge fantasies.
Boeke,
Calling an argument “flimsy” without explanation is fun, I suppose, and certainly requires less thought and effort than providing an explanation.
As to “imputing something stupid to your imagined opponent” (I assume that you refer to Islamists), I seem to recall that many who accepted that Adolph Hitler’s words were intended to be taken seriously and that he intended to act on them were considered to be imputing something stupid to an imagined opponent. Oh well. Maybe he was a good but misunderstood guy after all, the Holocaust never happened and to the extent that it did it was a good idea — just as “honor killings,” stonings of adulteress, women who have been raped, apostates and other wicked miscreants along with the elimination of the wicked Joos from the face of the Earth are good ideas. I consider them perverse.
And that is why the Middle-East is going to blow up in the facce of political correctness.