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Aug. 31, 2007 As president Bush's grip on the Middle East finally takes hold liberals become ever more idiotic in their prediction of a doomed effort. The lunacy regarding the collapse of the west has been around for a long time. Its original exponents; Voltaire, Hume Gibbon and Montesquieu wrote copiously on their contemporary’s in order to indict them. One of the more recent indictors of western civilization is Arnold Toynbee; his World History containing specific bias against western civilizations in general. According to him Aristotle was a racist as he believed Hellenes to be superior to other races. Superior in what? Were they born superior or were they given supra natural powers after birth? He does not say. Did they have superior social systems, superior methods of philosophy. Well I personally would say they did. Classical Greek is still the language of medicine. The Iliad and The Odyssey can be found in most libraries of world which is more than can be said for the works of other races. They did manage to rule a large chunk of the world passing their knowledge on to the Romans who in turn passed it on to their successors the Christianized tribes inheriting their empire who in turn handed it on to the USA. Were they racist? Admittedly they did not give citizenship to foreigners the criteria being that both parents had to be citizens of the particular city state in which the person was claiming citizenship. An interesting winkle was that in order to be a citizen one had to also partake in the government of the state in some manner, not necessarily on a full time basis. The Macedonian Alexander the Great was a great admirer of Hellenic culture and was a pupil of Aristotle. As he conquered Persia he changed the composition of his army incorporating the defeated peoples thus ending the traditional phalanx only military unit, the new units now containing cavalry or a composition of cavalry and infantry. He could not have supported these units if there was an element of racism as the various branches were closely intertwined. Some may state that he was also heavily influenced by his latter teacher Theophrastus who’s views were not so dogmatic as those of Aristotle, but still he was under his influence early in life and what we learn when we are young usually stays with us for the rest of our lives, albeit usually in a modified form. Upon conquering a city or province Alexander would leave the original government intact with the provision that it adhere to his authority. Revolt in the newly incorporated territories was almost non existent, in fact he was more troubled by revolution in the Peloponnese than in Persia lending more credence to the position that Toynbee in this instance was wrong regarding Aristotles inherent racism. Next comes his attack upon the Romans. (I am concentrating on these two races as I have been unable to find a similar denigrating of any other races, in fact he goes out of his way in some cases to cover over or excuse their atrocities.) He states that with the end of the Punic Wars Rome made the island Delos a free port in order to weaken the island of Rhodes, the guarantors of law in the Mediterranean and the Aegean as its navy was supreme. The reason he gives for this granting of free port stautus was so that the resulting piracy combined with the crumbling of the Greek Seleucid Empire would leave Syria wide open to exploitation allowing Rome to enslave its population so as to build up war ravaged Italy and Sicily. How Rome could have predicted events occurring over hundreds of years after her placing Delos in the position of being a free point is beyond my ken? It would seem that at the time, nearly wiped out by the Carthaginians, Romans were more concerned with establishing themselves overseas in order to counter any future attacks. The tirade mounted in the popular media is but a continuation of these left wing philosophies and histories, Toynbee the most recent. The refutation of their arguments now becomes less important than in understanding why they take such a position. Since Gibbon wrote his ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ their have been those who couldn’t wait to jump on the band wagon. We next got ‘The Decline of the West’ by Oswald Spengler, and then a variety of doomsday predictors and denigrators including, Burckhardt and Toynbee. On their heels is the screeching rabble decrying ever thing created in the west be it Christianity, government, social customs etc. In fact it has become the correct thing to do to put down our system and build up any other, those living in these other systems of course noting this trend and taking advantage of it. Why do they do this when their very senses must tell them that they are wrong? They only have to look at the number of people trying to get into the western countries in order to see how wrong they are or, failing this, to look at the number of famines that have occurred here since say the fifteenth century.
These doomsday predictors are worthy of study
themselves. A separate branch of leaning could be set
up in order to study them. I can see a curriculum
where they are mapped from the day they are born
tracing: their early chilhood; their junior
shool, middle school, high school years; the type of
universities they attended; their chosen professions, if any; physical (or lack of) deprivation; substance abuse; political affiliation; their
reasoning process regarding available evidence; their
preferred entertainment, and whether the entertainment
contributed to their intellectual outlook. As Arthur
Herman stated (adjunct professor of history at George
Mason University and coordinator of the Western
Civilization Program at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C.)
in his book ‘Predications of western Decline’) ‘The
only decline appears to be in the believability of
those predicting western decline.’
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