By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Last week, The
Atlantic rendered a great service to those of us who contend that America
is in the middle of a civil war between the Right and the Left. It provided a
smoking gun — actually, the gunshot itself — to those of us who maintain that
the Left (never to be confused with liberals) is intent on dismantling Western
civilization.
It published articles by two left-wing writers, one by
Peter Beinart titled “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw
Speech” and one by its national correspondent, James Fallows, written on the
same theme as Beinart’s.
The subject of both articles was President Donald Trump’s
speech in Warsaw, Poland, last week, a speech described by the Wall Street Journal as “a determined and
affirmative defense of the Western tradition.”
Yet, to the Atlantic
writers, defending Western civilization is nothing more than a defense of white
racism.
Beinart begins his piece saying:
In his speech in Poland on
Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our
civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he
means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.
And Fallows begins saying, “What he called ‘civilization’
. . . boils down to ties of ethnicity and blood.”
Is there one liberal or conservative American who thinks
that the words “the West” and “Western civilization” mean a celebration of
white-blood purity?
I doubt it.
What we have here are two vital lessons.
One is that leftism is the primary racist ideology of our
time, seeing everything in terms of race, whereas mainstream liberalism and
conservatism advocate a race-blind society as manifest in Martin Luther King
Jr.’s famous “content of his character” line. The Left disdains this view.
To cite one of innumerable examples, the University of
California has published a list of biased “microaggression” statements students
and faculty are to avoid. One of them is “There is only one race, the human
race.”
In other words, the Left, which controls our
universities, teaches American students that it is wrong to believe in one
human race. That was precisely what the Nazis taught German students. And now,
we have another expression of this doctrine enunciated in the pages of The Atlantic: that those who wish to
protect or save Western civilization are talking about saving the white race.
I am certainly not equating leftism with Nazism. The Left
doesn’t seek to annihilate all Jews (it merely supports the Palestinians, who
seek to annihilate the Jewish state). I am merely stating an unassailable
truth: No significant political movement since the Nazis has “honored” race or
equated Western civilization with race, as Beinart and Fallows do.
The second service provided by the Atlantic writers is proof that the Left loathes Western
civilization and therefore has become the internal enemy of Western
civilization in both America and Europe.
In the Left’s eyes, the mere suggestion that Western
civilization needs to be saved is, by definition, a call for the preservation
of the white race. Therefore, the Left opposes calls to save Western
civilization. As Beinart wrote:
The most shocking sentence in
Trump’s speech — perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech
delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime — was his claim that “the fundamental
question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” . . .
Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious
paranoia.
Those of us who have long equated the Left with
opposition to Western civilization are vindicated. We didn’t need Beinart and
Fallows — we already had innumerable examples, such as the University of
Pennsylvania’s English department removing its longstanding poster of William
Shakespeare because he was a white male — but in their explicit articulation of
the Left’s view, they are immensely helpful.
Shakespeare is read in every language that has an
alphabet not because he was white or European but because he is regarded as the
greatest playwright who ever lived. But the leftists who run that English
department place race (and gender) above excellence — a thorough rejection of
Western values.
Ironically, outside of liberals and conservatives, those
most likely to celebrate Western values are likely to not be Western. The
Japanese would scoff at the idea that Bach and Beethoven did not write the
greatest music ever composed. That is why some of the greatest Bach recordings
of our time come from Japanese musicians living in Japan. Nor would the
Japanese deny that their modern country’s democratic values come from the West.
The West’s disdain for its own values is getting
increasingly strident with each passing day. President Trump is making an
important and laudable effort to reverse this trend. He’s walking in good
company. In an address to the Pan-American Scientific Congress in Washington,
D.C., on May 10, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Americans might
have to become the guardian of Western culture, the protector of Christian
civilization.” FDR frequently spoke about protecting both Western and Christian
civilization.
We owe a debt of gratitude to The Atlantic, CNN (whose senior White House correspondent, Jeff
Zeleny, described Trump’s address as a “white America, America first kind of
speech”), and others. They have made it clear that the Left has contempt for
Western civilization and therefore constitutes the greatest threat to its
survival.
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