White Guilt and Western Civilization
AMERICA AT WAR
COMMENTLINE
In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, Shelby Steele writes a provocative essay on how the condition known as our collective "white guilt" holds us back from pushing forward with common sense solutions to our most important domestic and foreign policy challenges
Steele says this guilt has profoundly changed our approach to world problems and caused "the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. "
This guilt, Steele thinks, has stigmatized any action the West takes today with the moral and racist sins of the past.
Read on....
NEWSLINES
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
NEWSBYTE
White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
By Shelby Steele
(www.opinionjournal.com) -- There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II. Read more.
From Amazon.com
White Guilt : How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Tags: Shelby Steele, War, Military, Human Rights
Global Tags: Washington DC, News and Politics, News, Politics, Current Events, Current Affairs, Life, Culture, Tension
COMMENTLINE In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, Shelby Steele writes a provocative essay on how the condition known as our collective "white guilt" holds us back from pushing forward with common sense solutions to our most important domestic and foreign policy challenges
Steele says this guilt has profoundly changed our approach to world problems and caused "the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. "
This guilt, Steele thinks, has stigmatized any action the West takes today with the moral and racist sins of the past.
Read on....
NEWSLINES
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
NEWSBYTE
White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
By Shelby Steele
(www.opinionjournal.com) -- There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II. Read more.
From Amazon.com
White Guilt : How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Tags: Shelby Steele, War, Military, Human Rights
Global Tags: Washington DC, News and Politics, News, Politics, Current Events, Current Affairs, Life, Culture, Tension
posted by Steven Moyer at 11:28 PM
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