The basic moral drive of Western civilization in the twentieth century has been appeasement. The civilization that has come to define what modernity actually is spends a lot of its time apologizing for its sins and accommodating the grievances of complainants. The West—and these days particularly America and the English-speaking parts of it—is where the rest of the world looks for cures for disease, charitable help, technical innovation, and the creation of respect for human rights. One might expect some recognition for such benefits, but everywhere we find complaints about our overbearing ways. What we seem to have done is to teach other cultures how to make capital out of grievances against us they never knew they had because they had previously taken such events as the small change of a violent world. We in the West are scourged for our involvement in slavery, for example, but get no gratitude (nor even recognition) for the fact that we alone abolished it. Again, much of socialist collectivism is the abandonment of Western economic dynamism in favor of allowing electorates to vote themselves rich with other peoples’ wealth. The ultimate paradox is that much of this demand for appeasement comes from within Western Civilization itself. What we might usefully call the academico-media complex is loud in its demands that whites should apologize to blacks, Christians to Muslims, the English to the Irish, imperial powers to those they colonized, men to women, and so on. No doubt many regrettable actions were performed
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A triumvirate for our time
On The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by John O’Sullivan.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 25 Number 6, on page 60
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https://newcriterion.com/article/a-triumvirate-for-our-time/