Alone Perhaps, But Is Trump Right?

Because he grounds his comments in history, I rarely disagree with Pat Buchanan -- but I take some issue with what he says below.  He notes President Trump's urging civilizational self-confidence for the West but is pessimistic about that civilizational self-confidence returning.  He seems to think that "We" have lost our collective balls.

I disagree.  I think the generally spineless response of the West to Islam is entirely a Leftist product.  During his ascent to the Presidency, his followers made pretty clear that they wanted a tough response to social problems and Mr Trump seems to be intent on such toughness.

So the challenge now is to get the Left out of their role of dictating what is right and acceptable.  The Left know that, which is why their response to Trump is so hysterical. But if Trump continues on to broad-based success for his policies, he should generate widespread support for them.  And the chattering class will have to move in his direction.  They will be a steadily shrinking minority talking to a steadily shrinking minority otherwise.

In short, I think that, after 8 years of Trump, America will have rediscovered its manhood and the rest of the world will gradually follow


At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade.

Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid? Is not the Obama-Merkel vision of a New World Order a utopian fantasy?

At the monument to the patriots of the Warsaw Uprising, Trump cited Poland as exemplar of how a great people behaves in a true national crisis.

Calling the Polish people "the soul of Europe," he related how, in the Miracle of the Vistula in 1920, Poland, reborn after 12 decades of subjugation, drove back the invading Red Army of Leon Trotsky.

He described the gang rape of Poland by Nazis and Soviets after the Hitler-Stalin pact. He cited the Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps by Stalin, and the rising of the Polish people against their Nazi occupiers in 1944, as the vulturous legions of Stalin watched from the safe side of the river.

When the Polish Pope, John Paul II, celebrated his first Mass in Victory Square in 1979, said Trump, "a million Polish men, women and children raised their voices in a single prayer. ... 'We want God.' ... Every Communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down." And so it did.

The crisis of the West today, said Trump, is akin to what Poland faced. For it is about the survival of a civilization, rooted in Christianity, that has made the greatest of all contributions to the ascent of man.

What enabled the Poles to endure was an unshakable belief in and a willingness to fight for who they were — a people of God and country, faith, families, and freedom — with the courage and will to preserve a nation built on the truths of their ancient tribe and Catholic traditions.

Given the threats to the West, from within and without, said Trump, we need such a spirit now. What are those threats?

"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

"We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive."

Trump professed confidence in the West's will to survive. But whether the West still has the character seems an open question.

Across the West, the traditional family has been collapsing for decades. Not one European nation has a birth rate that will enable its people to survive many more generations. Uninvited migrants in the millions have poured in — are pouring in — from Africa and the Middle East. The elite of Europe have been gladly surrendering their national sovereignties to transnational institutions like the EU.

Christianity is more of a dying than a thriving faith on the Old Continent. And as the churches empty out, the mosques are going up. Before our eyes, the West is being remade.

In June, gays and lesbians celebrated in Berlin as the German Parliament voted to approve same-sex marriage.

In Moscow, from May to July, a million Russians stood in lines a mile long to view and venerate a relic of the 4th-century bishop, St. Nicholas, on display in a glass case in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, rebuilt under President Putin.

Liberated from Leninism, Russia returns to the old faith, as Germany returns to Weimar.

At that G-20 gathering in Hamburg, hundreds of criminal thugs went on a three-day rampage — rioting, burning, looting and battling police, some 300 of whom were injured.

Were the autocrats of the G-20 — Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Narendra Modi of India — impressed with the resolute response of Angela Merkel — the media-designated new "Leader of the West" — to mobs rioting in Germany's second city?

At Harvard, Alexander Solzhenitsyn described what was on display in Hamburg: "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite."

Secularist and hedonist, New Europe worships at the altars of mammon. Handel's "Messiah" cannot compete with moonwalking Michael Jackson's "We Are the World."

Once Europe went out to convert, colonize and Christianize the world. Now the grandchildren of the colonized peoples come to Europe to demand their share of their inheritance from a West besotted with guilt over its past sins that cannot say "No!"

SOURCE

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The Atlantic Publishes All You Need to Know About the Left

The race-obsessed Left see racism everywhere

Dennis Prager
 
Last week, The Atlantic rendered a great service to those of us who contend that America is in the midst of a civil war between the Right and the Left. It provided a smoking gun — actually, the gunshot itself — to those of us who contend that the Left (never to be confused with liberals) is intent on dismantling Western civilization.

It published articles by two left-wing writers, one by Peter Beinart titled “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech,” and one by its national correspondent, James Fallows, written on the same theme as Beinart’s.

The subject of both articles was President Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw, Poland, last week, a speech described by The Wall Street Journal as “a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition.”

Yet, to The Atlantic writers, defending Western civilization is nothing more than a defense of white racism.

Beinart begins his piece saying: “In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to ‘the West’ and five times to ‘our civilization.’ His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.”

And Fallows begins saying, “what he called ‘civilization’ … boils down to ties of ethnicity and blood.”

Is there one liberal or conservative American who thinks that the words “the West” and “Western civilization” mean a celebration of white-blood purity?

I doubt it.

What we have here are two vital lessons.

One is that leftism is the primary racist ideology of our time, seeing everything in terms of race, whereas mainstream liberalism and conservatism advocate a race-blind society as manifest in Martin Luther King Jr.‘s famous “content of his character” line. The left disdains this view.

To cite one of innumerable examples, the University of California has published a list of biased “microaggression” statements students and faculty are to avoid. One of them is “There is only one race, the human race.”

In other words, the Left, which controls our universities, teaches American students that it is wrong to believe in one human race. That was precisely what the Nazis taught German students. And now, we have another expression of this doctrine enunciated in the pages of The Atlantic: that those who wish to protect or save Western civilization are talking about saving the white race.

I am certainly not equating leftism with Nazism. The Left doesn’t seek to annihilate all Jews (it merely supports the Palestinians, who seek to annihilate the Jewish state). I am merely stating an unassailable truth: No significant political movement since the Nazis has “honored” race or equated Western civilization with race, as Beinart and Fallows do.

The second service provided by The Atlantic writers is proof that the Left loathes Western civilization and therefore has become the internal enemy of Western civilization both in America and Europe.

In the Left’s eyes, the mere suggestion that Western civilization needs to be saved is, by definition, a call for the preservation of the white race. Therefore, the Left opposes calls to save Western civilization. As Beinart wrote: “The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech — perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime — was his claim that 'The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.’ … Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia.”

Those of us who have long equated the Left with opposition to Western civilization are vindicated. We didn’t need Beinart and Fallows — we already had innumerable examples, such as the University of Pennsylvania English department removing its longstanding poster of William Shakespeare because he was a white male — but in their explicit articulation of the Left’s view, they are immensely helpful.

Shakespeare is read in every language that has an alphabet not because he was white or European but because he is regarded as the greatest playwright who ever lived. But the leftists who run that English department place race (and gender) above excellence — a thorough rejection of Western values.

Ironically, outside of liberals and conservatives, those most likely to celebrate Western values are likely to not be Western. The Japanese would scoff at the idea that Bach and Beethoven did not write the greatest music ever composed. That is why some of the greatest Bach recordings of our time come from Japanese musicians living in Japan. Nor would the Japanese deny that their modern country’s democratic values come from the West.

The West’s disdain for its own values seems to getting increasingly strident with each passing day. President Trump is making an important and laudable effort to reverse this trend. He’s walking in good company. In an address to the Pan-American Scientific Congress in Washington, DC, on May 10, 1940, then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Americans might have to become the guardian of Western culture, the protector of Christian civilization.” FDR frequently spoke about protecting both Western and Christian civilization.

We owe a debt of gratitude to The Atlantic, CNN (whose senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny described Trump’s address as a “white America, America first kind of speech”) and others. They have made it clear that the Left has contempt for Western civilization and therefore constitutes the greatest threat to its survival.

SOURCE

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