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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Not Ready for Civilization, part II

Via Lawrence Auster, a report that Muslim militias in Basra, soon to undergo a complete transition back to local governance, are threatening Christian women who have hitherto declined to wear the veil or burqa.

Actually, the "not ready for civilization" part could apply equally well to America and Britain themselves, inasmuch they embarked upon an unjust war, which they sought to justify by appeal to multifarious fraudulent pretexts, ideological, evidentiary, and material, which war has had as its entirely foreseeable consequence the grievous and irreversible destruction of indigenous Christian communities. They do not "make a desert and call it peace"; no, they do worse: they unleash evil and laud themselves for having done good, and connive at gross injustice and wallow in the pretense of virtue.

Comments (5)

Could Mr. Martin elaborate on how the invasion of Iraq "had as its entirely foreseeable consequence the grievous and irreversible destruction of indigenous Christian communities"?

As one could followed and participated in the year-long debate about the invasion of Iraq before the invasion took place, I don't remember a single time that anyone said that it would lead to the destruction of Iraq's Christian communities.

I agree that in the aftermath we can see clearly that democracy in Iraq has empowered Muslim traditionalism which in turn has led to the persecution of Christians. But I don't know of anyone who foresaw this result before the invasion.

But I don't know of anyone who foresaw this result before the invasion.

Mr. Auster--

I don't remember having heard anybody predict Christian persecution in Iraq as a result of the overthrow of the Baathist regime, either. But that isn't saying much, considering all of the other things that weren't foreseen and adequately prepared for.
With hindsight, of course, the persecution of Christians in Iraq should have been foreseen and adequate precautions taken to prevent it. Unfortunately, what was "foreseen" by the war-mongers surrounding Bush was our invasion force being greeting as liberators. Well, there were plenty of people who did not believe that would happen. If those people had moved on from their dubiety about being greeted as liberators, to the very predictable insurgency, and thence to the probable fate of Christians in a now lawless Muslim country, under seige by what was considered by the locals to be a Christian/crusader army, the foreseeable could rather easily have been foreseen.


I will mention one other prediction: that the toppling of Saddam and the subsequent chaos would be a disaster for the 2,000-year-old Christian community in Iraq. Before the war even started, I had written (Cultural Revolutions, March 2003 - meaning that the issue was going to press in late January or early February at the latest) that "Iraqi Christians are paying the price of the Bush administration's desire to remove Saddam Hussein." (Wayne Allensworth, from Iraq as "Intelligence Failure": We Told You So, in the March, 2007 issue of Chronicles.)

Allensworth then proceeds to quote from his March, 2003 essay predicting the visitation of Mahometan wrath upon the Christians of Iraq:

Iraq's Christians fear that they will be the first victims of a war that might dismember the country, unleashing ethnic and religious conflicts that Baghdad had suppressed. Tariq, a Christian merchant in Baghdad, told the French weekly Marianne that "If the United States goes to war against our country... (t)he Wahhabis and other fundamentalists will take advantage of the confusion to throw us out of our homes, destroy us as a community, and declare Iraq an Islamic nation!" If recent history is any indication, Tariq has cause for concern: The Shiite uprising in southern Iraq during the Gulf War - encouraged and then abandoned by Washington - targeted Christians.

The repression of the Christian communities of Iraq, their reduction to the de facto status of dhimmis, was almost analytically deducible from the combination of a)what we know of Islam as a religion and doctrine, and b) the bizarre neoconservative fetishization of "democracy": the implementation of even marginally democratic norms within a Muslim society permits the traditional norms, customs, and strictures of Sharia to receive popular legitimacy, with all that this entails for adherents of minority faiths.


Maximos,

The Christians were already dhimmis under Saddam. Being from a harmless community they could survive as teachers, receptionists and doctors handling as it were the service economy. But anyone deducing that this arrangement whereby Christians for their own survival align themselves with murderous Baathist regimes whether in Iraq or Syria would last much beyond the dictators themselves, is deluding himself. When the time comes for the islamists to settle scores, who do you think will be thrown to the wolves? Christians would have been identified as beneficiaries. The pattern of despoilation that we have seen in all failed states would have just repeated itself.

As a warmonger I can easily argue that even a flawed democratic dispensation would enable the Christians to protect their rights without being in the thrall of a Big Man.

Ivan, I value the security of the Christian populations of the Middle East much more highly than I value 'democracy', which, incidentally, being an essentially majoritarian dispensation, will no more protect the rights of the Christians from the depredations of the Mahometan, whether direct or functions of indifference, than it will secure a new flowering of freedom.

As for the delusions to which you refer, I am agreed. All the more reason for Americanot not to press for the expansion of its democratic-capitalist hallucinations into the Near East. Any argument to the contrary, that we should just have done with it, seems to be an argument that the Christians will get it at some point in time, so we may as well give history a push and get it over with. Bah. I'll choose Christianity before either democracy or capitalism, or any of the other rot that we push in the Near East.

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