Readers Comments - EURSOC - News and comment from Europe

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Reader's Comment on Pacifism Grips Europe. A US reader writes:

Is this one a news flash? Pacifism has been rampant in European policy making since at least 1968. As you point out the KGB made the best use of European pacifism throughout the Cold War. Europeans objected to every effort by Reagan to defeat the Soviet Union through the '80's. They would now give greater credit to Gorbachev than Reagan for the fall of the Soviet Union. Now that the generation of '68 is in full control of Europe, it can finally implement the anti-American anti-capitalism policies in which it has always believed but which the World War II generation never bought into, and it is. The people of Europe are ready to follow their leaders anywhere that does not involve violent conflict.

How firmly implanted is this pacifism? When America was attacked on 9/11 Europe rushed to America's defense under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, knowing it was a gesture Europe would not be called upon to honor but making the gesture. When Spain suffered a similar attack on 3/11 there was no such rush to defend Spain. Nor have the Spanish chosen to defend themselves. They will reach an accommodation through other mean. "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists." So the real victory for Al Qaeda is that it did in three years what the Soviet Union could not do in fifty, destroy NATO. And nobody noticed.

"Europe is at war." No. War is being made upon Europe, but Europe is not resisting. It is hard to have a war with only one side. A massacre, a conquest, perhaps, but not a war.

Reader's Comment on Europe In Denial:

The thrust of this article is that Europe's leadership is failing. But leaders can only lead so far ahead of their people in a democracy. That is why FDR could not bring America into the war in Europe until Hitler declared war on the U. S. The European leaders are reflecting the desires of the people who elect them and that is as it should be in a democracy. Democracy does not mean that mistakes will not be made, only that the mistakes for which the people will suffer will be their own.

The European people led by the Generation of '68 want to throw off the shackles of the American militarism that committed war crimes in Vietnam and threatened to blow up the world with unimaginable nuclear weapons. In America there were two parts of the Generation of '68. They will have at each other again this November. Both sides will be back for the rematch four years later. I sense no similar split in the European generation. The direction is set and Europe is on auto-pilot. That is why when the pro-Vietnam part of the American Generation of '68 is in power it will be unable to communicate with a Europe that does not accept that there can be a different direction.

The European people do not want to be enslaved by an American capitalism that oppresses and exploits the weak and poor and threatens the world with global warming. And the Europeans do not want their high culture polluted by the vulgarities for the masses from America. The European people have seen what their child, America, has become and they are not pleased. They simply want to enjoy their final years in peace. That is why they have stopped having children. They are dying.

And so their leaders are giving them what they want, a nice peaceful neighborhood in which to enjoy their declining years. If this means making deals with the worlds most heinous dictators and tyrants, so be it, as long as no violence in Europe is involved.

Reader's Comment on France Threatens Taiwan Elections:

So how to resist the Ugly Americans and keep peace in the neighborhood?

First, search the world over for the power to return us to a bi-polar world where the Americans can no longer pursue their hegemonic designs. That power riding in on a Red horse? China. My enemies enemy is now my friend. And likewise, my enemy's friend is my enemy. So France joins China to intimidate Taiwanese democracy. As a result France will gain a relationship with the new rising power to oppose the hyper-puissance. France will be able to rise again to the highest rank of world power and restore her glory and honor by directing the new international alliance against America as it has led the smaller nations in the creation of a European Union.

Second, to assure peace be reasonable and make whatever accommodation is necessary with the young bullies in the neighborhood. Write Christianity out of European history and culture. Allow sharia to prevail in predominantly Islamic neighborhoods. Perhaps in a few months all French girls will be wearing tricolour hajibs to school.

Reader's Comment on Tuesday's Quote of the Day

"If it was al-Qaeda in Spain, they changed the result of the election." Not really, al-Qaeda didn't get to vote, only Spaniards did. And they simply revealed themselves to be what they are. Europeans.

In America we say God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it. Wouldn't it be ironic if the price of gaining freedom for Iraq was finding out that it was something Europeans didn't want after all. The last century was certainly a waste of time. I wonder how many other Americans question how much time we should waste on Europe in the Pacific century.

We also had an email from a US reader commenting on how certain far-left websites praised the killings of four US missionaries in Iraq.:

The DU types who condone the murders of Christian missionaries prove that the left is bad because the left is an ideology based primarily on amoral "post-modernist moral relativism."

This explains ALL their behavior their ideology and why they condone murder.

They see the Jihadists as merely a nativist movement which is responding to/countering the imposition of western ideology.

In essence, the DU types reject Eleanor Roosevelt's "classically liberal"/neo-con U.N. document "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" - which, like FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech - asserts that all humans everywhere have inherently the same rights.

Instead the Left and the DU types see all "value systems" as morally equivalent, arbitrary creations. To the "pomo-moral relatovists" the cannibals moral code is equivalent to the moral codes of the Nazis, the Hopis, and the Essenes.

And therefore, they conclude that who are "we" to impose our arbitrary values on anyone else. And they argue that this type of imposition can only be attempted by powerful, hegemonic "bully" states (like the USA), and the bully states only attempt this on/against the weak underdog states - states for whom the Left and the DU types reserve their admiration and sympathies. The Left and the DU types feel that "bullies are always bad, and underdog/victims are always good" - because they believe that everyone should just be left alone to follow their own "way", because every "way" is equivalent.

This is why the Left and the DU types are always "PRO" the enemies of the USA: Because they believe all values are either "subjective and/or cultural" they believe that all culture conflicts are MERELY power plays. Because we are strong and our enemies are weak - they consider us the bully, and they side with/favor the underdog/victim - to them the underdog/VICTIM is ALWAYS morally superior; in fact, this is why VICTIMHOOD is the central - if not only - value they valorize. And because they always side with the underdog/VICTIM; they always oppose the USA, or the West in any conflict with any other culture or country.

A very good example of this is Israel: only when Israel was seen as the underdog/VICTIM did the left side with Israel (b4 1967). After 1967, the Left and the DU types simply abandoned Israel and switched sides, and it seems NO AMOUNT of terror can make them switch back as long as the Arabs can portray themselves as VICTIMS/underdogs - as when they defend terror by saying: "But Israel is so strong, and the Palestinian Arabs so weak; the Arabs have no choice but to use terror?!"

This "pomo-moral relativism" also explains why the left argues that "you cannot impose democracy or freedom" because they do not see these values as innately human and the birthright of all humans, but merely as western falsehoods.

This also explains why they argue that "Bush is a simpleton who is too stupid to know that there is no such thing as evil, and when Bush says that 'there is evil and it is bad' he proves himself to be a religious fanatic." Because in theor minds "evil" is a culturally relative and subjective concept, and anyone that thinks it's universal - or that the difference between "good & evil" is "black& white" MUST be an ignorant fool, a person untutored in the wise and elaborate "truths" of "the academy" which since the 1920's has been dominated by the "pomo-moral relativists."

And the left's "pomo-moral relativism" is why they favor the "nuanced" hedging of Kerry and the French: Like the convoluted language of the semiotic/Marxist/psychoanalytical obscurantist philosophers they beatify, they love overly complex, abstruse, analogical/metaphorical and "poetic" ambiguities (feeling that life is really too complex for any human to grasp it any other way), and declaim empiricism as stupid.

Moral relativism is the handmaiden of evil because it disarms people of their ability to counter evil; When "do what thou wilt" is the whole of the law, and when people do what is right in their own eyes --- they do evil, and cannot criticize anyone else for doing evil; evil is a subjective/culturally specific term to them.

However, to actually do good deeds, to be just and fair one must actually consider how one's values, and actions effect others, and ask "what would the implication of their universalization be?" as in: "What would happen if EVERYONE felt/behaved in such-and-such a way. "

Doing this requires "getting out of one's self" - it requires that we: (1) consider others - our neighbors - to be as important as ourselves, to have the same rights as we have; (2) to love the other as we love our self; and (3) to NOT do unto others as we would NOT have others do unto us.

Universalization demonstrates how, if everyone always bombed innocent third parties to get their way, the whole human world would vanish. Relativism cannot demonstrate this; in fact "pomo-moral relativists" and cultural relativists don‚t even have a moral basis for condemning slavery or child abuse.

Universalization of morals, values, and deeds is why sane people reject "pomo-moral relativism" and don‚t tolerate terror: Terror - and its appeasers - the "pomo-moral relativists" - breeds nihilism, and nihilism destroys human society, and without human society human life is miserable - if not impossible. The Left and the DU types really have NO moral basis for intervening in other countries in order to reduce the misery, the ignorance, and the poverty of so rampant in so many parts of the world. YES: In the end, theirs is a vapid and useless political ideology because it porvides no basis for helping our fellow human. The "pomo/moral relativists" have no basis for fighting nihilism. That is why the "pomo/m.r." left is lost, useless, and annoyingly WRONG. And, why they are essentially ALWAYS the allies of our enemies, and of the enemies of Civilization.

Now have your say! Please email us at eursoc-at-noos.fr with your comments, replacing 'at' with '@'.

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