For three weeks France allowed its buildings and property to be burned, its schools and hospitals to be ravaged, and some of its own citizens to be beaten. What type of society and government leadership would allow such things to happen practically unanswered? A society that feels guilty. A society whose forefather philosopher Rousseau taught that the bad that individuals or members of a particular group do is "society's fault."
Politically correct France, living by Europe's absolutist rule of "tolerance," assuaged its guilt - so endemic now in western societies - by abiding its own destruction at the hand of others. Under a justification that the mobs were impelled by a sense of disenfranchisement, defense of person and property was seen as far less important than "understanding" the perpetrators. In fact, the political sociologists labeled as victims not the innocent ones who bore the brunt of the terror but the perpetrators themselves.
France showed that those unwilling to fight Islamic terror beyond its boundaries will be unwilling to fight it even when taking place within its own borders. Those who "understand" the "rage" being played out daily against Westerners traveling in Arabia, and for decades now against Israel, will intone similar justification for the pogroms of rage being played out against their own citizens walking streets at home, even in the suburbs of Paris.
Not wanting to do what has to be done finally to stop the brutality now come to Europe, France and Europe would rather lay the blame on the West, itself, than confront a reality they wish not to confront, since they do not have the stomach to do anything that someone, even the Islamic radicals, may label "intolerant." Today's timid political correctness claims the solution lies in us, not them. It would rather surrender its freedoms and way of life as a hope to stop the terror inside than root out every vestige of Islamic radicalism residing within its borders.
But that will not stop the jihadists - they smell the fear.
A message to France, Europe, and America: A society that feels guilt-ridden by its own success or ethos will not have the fortitude and stomach to defend itself. It will feel either unworthy or feel that what it is and has is not worth dying for. Liberalism and secularism have brought much of the West to this condition. I guess what America needs is yet another Bill Clinton apology from America to Somewhere, Someplace, Somehow.
Like Paris, San Francisco is a beautiful city with fine dining, a city that likes to boast of being cosmopolitan and nuanced, the most politically left city in the country. They have called for a resolution against our fight against terror abroad. They are against army recruitment in schools, and a supervisor there questioned our need for the military. More so than other cities, its citizens assert that most of the ill will against us, including Islamic terror, is our fault. It is not for nothing that they are called San Francisco Blame-America-First Democrats.
As subscribers to "it's society's fault," guilt-ridden San Franciscans allow the homeless to live, sleep, defecate, and harass everywhere, soiling its streets and terrifying citizens. Defense of innocent person and property must take a back seat to the more important need of assuaging guilt - "We abide and suffer and thus are forgiven." The bourgeois guilt-ridden are sitting patsies to those groups and individuals (Islamists?) smart enough to play the "aggrieved/disenfranchised card." Oh how sweet it is to show one's "tolerance" if the consequences of such a display are temporary and don't put one out for too long.
France is a country suffused in sexual deviancy, decadence, immersed in the sensual. Decadent societies, those preoccupied with pleasure, do not fight, and eventually wither. We all know what happened to Rome. In its final days, it was weakened by decadence and thus fell prey to barbarians, barbarians without a formal military superstructure but a willingness to die for a cause.
There is a direct correlation between decadence and demise. It is not a coincidence that those most occupied in advancing societal sexual license are the ones most vocal against fighting Islamic terrorism, be they in Europe or America. Those pushing for every form of sexual and abortion "right" are usually those trying to stymie our war effort under a "concern" for terrorist rights.
The correlation is obvious. Decadence is a failure by the individual to fight against carnal and sensual impulses that must be overcome. Hedonism is the easy way out, a capitulation. Simply, give in. This failure to fight what needs to be defeated is infectious to other facets of life. The hedonist's failure to fight is not that of the principled religious pacifist, it is the unwillingness to fight for anything except that which stands in the way of his pleasure.
The hedonist's unwillingness to call certain pleasures an evil that must be overcome deadens him to evil and leads him to an acceptance of the barbarism and evil of outside enemies. What does he do when challenged with this evil? The same as he does when challenged by sinfulness. He accommodates it, he surrenders. He will not admit to his own cravenness, so he says the enemy is not evil rather "misunderstood" or acting that way because forced to by outside forces - i.e., it is "America's fault" or "society's fault".
Wishing not to be disturbed from pursuing his pleasures, the person preoccupied by pleasure, the hedonist, ignores veritable outside threats and circumstances. When faced by them, he dismisses them as easily overcomeable, requiring not a call to arms and sacrifice but a simple solution like just "giving them what they want" so we can continue to eat, drink and be merry. Just give them Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, the Coptics, Maronites, the Philippines, shariah law, Mideast churches, censorship over our Press. After all, it is our imperialism and arrogance that started this whole mess to begin with.
But these pieties are nothing more than bribes.
That the hedonist is unwilling to see lurking danger is obvious. Are not hedonists engaged daily in pleasures and activities that we, and they, all know lead to disease? Yet the desire for immediate pleasure overrides the commonsense need to look out for the harmful consequences looming in the near future. Likewise do we find blindness among those whose immediate need for power, or their on-going war against Christians of Faith, leads them to weaken our country and embolden the jihadists just so they can displace the President and his religious allies. They'll worry about the strengthened jihadists, later.
Societies obsessed with non-traditional sexual activity and comfortable with licentiousness are ones in which masculinity has been devalued and effeminacy elevated. Secularization has engendered the erosion and mocking of traditional sexual behaviors, which has led to effeminization. The masculine virtues of knowing how to use force and wage and win war have become devalued - precisely the wrong modus operandi for what faces us now. If not reversed, it will lead to our demise as it did with past societies so afflicted.
There is nothing new about societies in the grip of hedonism. Today, however, we justify this age-old penchant to do whatever our libido and emotions want by calling it "tolerance." We try to sanitize our weakness, indeed ennoble it. Indeed, tolerance is today's barometer of virtue, the center cut of the secular liturgy. But tolerance can not mean the forfeiture of moral values and standards. When a society is loosing its way, it labels as "new found tolerance" those things and activities that are the antithesis of its founding. However, the common man is not fooled.
San Francisco is America's capital of all types of sexual experimentation and the most vocal against our war on terror. The correlation between decadence and surrender/demise is here verified. Though in our free society over-the-top sexual activities and lifestyles are legal, they are not a virtue, though that is what San Francisco claims and wishes to enshrine.
Bestowing on people supportive of or engaged in all manner of sexual anarchy the appellation "tolerant," has led to the politically correct notion that those so engaged or supportive are superior to the Founding Fathers, who are now referred to as "homophobic," etc. In other words, those with moral standards are considered "not as nice" as those with libertine views and practices. Those who imbibe or countenance all desires and pleasures are, in today's tolerant-of-all-society, considered more virtuous than those exercising self-control.
The high priests of "tolerance" have no tolerance for those who still venerate a sexual moral standard, so much so that they dispatch their armies of litigators to extinguish the symbols of orthodoxy. It must be so. For they must remove from their path any challenge to their attainment of unlimited pleasure. Yes, they must remove Good. They don't start out against Good, but often end up against it, aligning themselves, maybe only temporarily, with those forces against, opposite, Good: Evil. They can accept and understand Islamofacism.
Societies do not die, perhaps, because people no longer attend church. They do die, however, when overtaken by severe secularization. Countries do perish when weakened by hedonism, decadence, and a lack of nationalism; when they no longer believe in their founding principles - which for us was, and is, the Judeo-Christian ethic. Why fight if there is nothing transcendent to fight for? No country ever went to war, let alone won, in the name of decadence and alternative sexual lifestyles. It happened in France; could it happen in San Francisco?
