Eurika! The Trouble with Europe ...

For months now I have been trying to find a proper analysis of the problems facing us in Europe today. And last night at an unearthly hour (as usual) I found 'it'.
'It' is an article by George Weigel, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., an adj. fellow of Discovery Institute and author of most recently God's Choice (HarperCollins) (review on this blog at a later date). The article on Discovery Institute DBase is dated 1st May and I am just wondering why I missed it, as it might have prevented me from feeling so totally alienated and confused all summer. But then, I might have taken better notice of a co-production written by Marcello Pera, an agnostic Italian academic turned politician and former president of the Italian Senate and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as Pope Benedict XVI was known before he was elected. Their exchange of views about relativism, Christianity and Western culture has been laid down in a book under the title "Without Roots" (review again later on).

The basic gist of the analysis is known in Holland under the paradigm Weg met Ons! (Down With Us!), a deep feeling of self-loathing which underlines all our actions and attitudes towards culture and religion. It comes forth from the Leftist conclusion how bad we have behaved in the past (slavery, colonialism, (commercially) exploiting noble savages and making them sick with our germs, spreading the faith through the sword, witch hunts, fighting endless Twenty Days' and Eighty Years' Wars and the unspeakable events of the Crusades, that absolute pit of medieval Christian "expansionism" commonly referred to as "colonialism" (see time-line issues). This is evidently only a preliminary shortlist: the actual list of Western civilization's crimes against other worthy and noble peoples (not to mention the animal kingdom) is of course much larger! This is the essence of the problem and it permeates all we do and all our views and reactions.

So it's time for a comprehensive culture shift ("the times, they are a-changing", remember that one?), but first let's read the books before passing judgment, eh? ... to be continued.

In the news today: the Sons of Peace are celebrating the end of the fasting period (to multi-culturalists also known as Ramadan) in their usual way, namely drenched in blood.