From: Jonathan Davis (jonathan.davis@lineone.net)
Date: Thu Sep 25 2003 - 03:27:47 MDT
Do yourself a favour, read the book. The rant below is an enormous straw man
attack and worse than bunk.
I invite you to look at the review on Amazon.com from top 50 reviewers:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1882926811/002-8539985-9668049
?v=glance
How many books are sold and praised in both the Liberal Democrats and the
Conservatives?
http://bookshop.libdems.org.uk/item.jsp?ID=2634
http://shop.conservatives.com/item.jsp?ID=2634
Finally, I recommend Roger Kimball's excellent review of the book here:
Why the West? by Roger Kimball
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/jan03/west.htm
Kind regards
Jonathan
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-virus@lucifer.com [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com] On Behalf Of
Kharin
Sent: 24 September 2003 22:04
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: Re:virus: The Ideohazard 1.1
" To understand why these agreements are being undermined, I recommend "The
West and the Rest" by Roger Scruton."
Hmmm.
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commentary/story/0,4386,210796,00.html
A right to represent the world
By DEEP K. DATTA-RAY
THE United Nations is on trial for its life. And not only because it was
ignored over the Iraq war.
Though US Secretary of State Colin Powell has promised to restore some of
its lost authority after the trauma of war, that has not silenced shrill
voices - not only of the American neo-conservatives - calling for an end to
the world body.
Eminent British philosopher Roger Scruton argues the UN has no right to
represent the planet since it is a European product - steeped, he says, in
Western values which are alien to what he calls, using an outdated
colonial-era term, 'East of Suez'.
The phrase itself is Orientalist in Edward Said's pejorative sense for it
reduces the Technicolor hues of non-European life to a monochrome.
Similarly, Scruton's European values are Occidentalist for they deny
Westerners their individuality and the complexities of History.
Both terms have a long history. Karl Marx spoke of the 'Asiatic mode of
production' as being inferior to some standard European system.
Such monotone arguments form the basis of Scruton's case. He shackles
Europeans with the same handcuffs that Orientals found so repressive.
Chafing at generalisations, Westerners might welcome the end of the myth of
'Occidentalism'.
Scruton's argument that the UN stems from a wave of innovative thinking
known today as the European Enlightenment reeks of occidentalism. A leading
light of the Enlightenment, Hugo Grotius, dwelt in the 18th century on the
concepts that are enshrined at the UN's heart.
Grotius was certainly enlightened, but that did not mean that contemporary
Europe was. He was not typical, he did not even represent the majority. His
incarceration by the Calvinist orthodoxy that held sway in his native United
Provinces - today's Holland - testifies to the fact that other Europeans
disapproved of and shunned his ideas.
Grotius' contemporaries knew that they were few and scattered throughout an
often hostile continent. That is why they spoke not of The Enlightenment -
thick with modern biases - but of The Republic of Letters, which signified a
territory and ideology, but lacked concrete shape or form.
The Republic was only as tangible as Letters. To say otherwise is to deny
the brilliant flare of Grotius' intellect which allowed him to think what
most did not and the courage to speak what others dared not.
The ideas that led to Grotius' imprisonment are now accepted in parts of
Europe.
How has this come about? Voltaire's allegorical answer is that ideas travel,
take seed, and blossom - just like coconuts from India might in Rome - if
the environment is congenial.
Grotius' ideas have taken root throughout the world, the germination has
borne precious fruit - the UN, which cannot be effective unless the
environment is amenable.
Scruton also tried to expose the 'fiction' of treating non-Western states at
par with European countries.
'African states are by no stretch of the imagination nation-states on the
European model,' he says, citing Nigeria because it is composed of three
disparate peoples.
But, what then of Belgium with 10 million people and five parliaments? There
is one each for the entire country, for Brussels, for the tiny
German-speaking community, for Wallonia and for French speakers.
Scruton's rejection of the differences within Europe denies Europeans their
individual identity.
It is not just Africa that falls short of Scruton's idea of Europe. He
dismisses the Middle East as just a 'more complex' Africa, while Iraq, over
which the UN haemorrhaged, is only a 'legal entity created by two
adventurous diplomats - Sykes and Picot', the British and French statesman
who partitioned the defeated Ottoman empire after World War I.
Being typical of non-Europeans, Iraqis, he says, have no conception of
allegiance to a single nation-state.
So should UN members not have debated Iraq? They certainly should have. The
Suez Canal does not neatly divide humanity into two groups.
Yugoslavia's disintegration proved Europe, too, had its share of artificial
states. Russia's Chechen and Spain's Basque separatists underline the same
point.
Even the United Kingdom threatens to come apart at the ethnic seams. There
are now three parliaments with Scotland and Wales jostling for more power,
while England wants to know why Scots and Welsh MPs should sit in
Westminster.
That European nations are also uniting as the European Union while some
European countries are fragmenting is indicative of mankind's need to stand
together.
The UN is the only organisation that makes this possible on a global scale.
To destroy it because ahistorical theorists believe it is an irrelevant
Western construct panders to the prejudice of occidentalism.
Europe is not united, just as the Orient is not. But every additional day
that the UN survives is testimony to the courage and determination of
individuals across time and space in their aim to unite the world.
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