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| What Muslims Must Do After 7/7 | Pentecostalism |
After the London Bombings: What We Can Do
by Christopher Chantrill
July 24, 2005 at 5:40 pm
WHO CAN fail to be shocked by last week’s story of London police pursuing a terror suspect into a subway train and shooting him dead? Eyewitness Mark Whitby was sitting in the train:
“I heard people shouting `get down, get down.’ An Asian guy ran on to the train and I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit - he was absolutely petrified.”He added: “The man half tripped and was then pushed to the floor by three plain-clothes police officers who were pursuing him.
“One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand.
“He held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it all. He was dead, five shots. I was literally less than five yards away.”
Forget about the friendly British bobby, the BBC’s avuncular PC Dixon and his: “What’s all this then?” Forget jolly British caper movies of the 1950s like The Lavender Hill Mob. All of a sudden the rules have changed.
It is all the more shocking when you consider that, since the Macpherson report in 1999 that acused the Metropolitan Police of institutional racism, policemen in London have had to fill in a form to report every encounter with a minority. But here the policemen hunted down an “Asian” suspect, pushed him to the floor, and killed him. Obviously somebody has changed the rules of engagement. Obviously the policemen that pursued and shot the suspect were no longer worried about accusations of institutional racism.
The rules have changed, and just as well. As of now the Brits are getting serious about the war on terror.
But what about the future? How long can they keep it up against the other enemy in the war against terror, the left-wing “Why do they hate us” crowd? Probably not too long. By the weekend, the Brits had found out they had shot the wrong man.
We know what the doubters and the snipers will do with that.
Mistakes or not, we scribblers must still provide covering fire so the soldiers in the war on terror can to do their job. We can start with an answer to the puling question: “Why do they hate us?” The answer was given half a century ago in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, written in the aftermath of World War II.
Hoffer experienced the Nazi movement not as a uniquely malevolent outburst but as a perfectly normal mass movement in the mold of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the various outbursts of Christianity, the explosion of Islam, and the militant mass movements of our own day, Marxism, fascism, Islamicism, and Pentecostal Christianity.
Every mass movement, he insisted, mobilizes its followers for action above all with one powerful force: Hate. It must have a devil, for every “difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting.” Ideally, the devil is a foreigner, or as we now say, the “other.”
Mass movements are not, as the left tirelessly insists, recruited from the mass of helpless victims. On the contrary, the “abjectly poor… stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change.” People attracted to a mass movement
must be discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future.
When Islamicist activist Anjem Choudray crows that “One day the black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street,” we can understand what he is saying. He is a leader of a mass movement in its active phase communicating an extravagant hope to his followers. He is doing his job.
The problem for the Islamicists is that the overthrow of the existing order is not just a question of raising the flag of Islam over Downing Street. Instead it is an enormously difficult operation. It can only succeed when the existing order is corrupted and demoralized and lacks the will to organize itself for defense. Or when the “men of words” of the existing order are actively engaged in corrupting and demoralizing it.
The secret weapon of the Islamicists is the left-wing woman of words who does everything in her power to delegitimize and marginalize the existing democratic capitalist order with her poison pen.
For us the task is simple, to fight smart and hard against the women and the men of words whose consuming passion is to defeat the existing global order of world-historical doers and builders. Are we up to the task?
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
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Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Hugo on Genius
“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up
rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008