Terrorism In London and The Culture War
Two great articles from the Wall Street Journal this morning…
London, Again: Second terrorist attack in the UK.
It’s time to learn from Israel.
“Due to some combination of good luck and possible incompetence, Londoners were spared serious casualties in yesterday’s apparent bus and train bombings. This is not something to take much comfort in. As the second attack in as many weeks, it means the Israelization of the war on terror may now be upon Britain and, sooner or later perhaps, Europe and America, too.
By “Israelization,” we refer to the steady stream of bus, cafe, grocery, mall and street bombings to which Israeli civilians have been wantonly subjected these past several years. Unlike the September 11 attacks in the U.S. or last year’s Madrid bombings, none of these have been terrorist “spectaculars,” in the sense that they required extensive preparation and resulted in three- or four-figure death tolls.”
The full article here.
The Future of Tradition: Can it withstand the onslaught of abstract reasoning?
Lee Harris explores the rise and fall of past culture wars.
“America has been in the midst of a culture war for some time and will probably remain so for some time longer. But culture war is not peculiar to this country. Indeed, there have been at least three great culture wars fought in the course of Western history, including one contemporaneous with the rise of the Sophists in ancient Greece, the epoch identified with the French Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung, and our own current battle. The first two ended in disaster for the societies in which they occurred–and the outcome of the third is still pending.
Each of these wars has its own particular antagonists, each its own weapons of combat, each its own battlefield. But the essential nature of a culture war is invariant: A set of traditional values comes under attack by those who, like the Greek Sophist, the French philosophe and the American intellectual, make their living by their superior proficiency in handling abstract ideas, and promote a radically new and revolutionary set of values. This is precisely what one would expect from those who excel in dispute and argumentation.”
The full article here.
May we learn from history to guide us thru the present.