ex cathedra: Another impressive guy

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Another impressive guy

Robert D. Kaplan, an American journalist who doesn't hate America.

A committed realist with values. I used to read him when I subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly, back before Michael Kelly died and before Jack Beatty and company turned it into yet another organ of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

I have learned much from his pieces on the state of the planet (The Coming Anarchy), on the real role of the media as modern inquisitors (The Media and Medievalism) and how a Western country with a Judeo-Christian tradition like America really has to to comport itself, not forgetting its Greco-Roman past (Warrior Politics). His latest is a description of the American military (Imperial Grunts).

Too lazy to craft a further blurb this morning, so here.

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's only job is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.