Defending the Gates of Civilization

Fire of Liberty

Suzanne Fields of the Washington Times has an excellent column on how the we in the US need to make sure that we batten down the hatches and add some greater steel to our society to prevent the forces within and without from pulling us down much like other great civilizations that have fallen before us. I have to say that Mrs. Fields probably is one of the better defenders of our civilization and seems to show it with this wonderful passage:

"Civilizations," Toynbee reminded us, "die from suicide, not murder." We've been seduced by lavish social welfare spending, prey to the blandishments of secularism and multiculturalism, and undermined by low birth rates (abetted by abortion on demand) that threaten survival. All these things have contributed to making us soft and selfish, shifting our focus to the good life that will come to a bloody end in the tiger's supper dish. Mark Steyn, in a remarkably trenchant essay in The New Criterion magazine, calls this the suicide bomb in the belly of our civilization.

These are the unintended consequences of well-meaning liberal attitudinizing. We've given priority to the secondary impulse for a comfortable cradle-to-grave security over the really important things like national defense, the concerns of family, the strengths of faith and the need to reproduce ourselves as the guarantee of survival.

Secularism is a cherished principle if it means keeping the responsibilities of the state separate from the church's responsibility for nurturing the soul, but the term and the principle have been distorted to mean hostility to the faith that sustained and inspired the founding fathers. Multiculturalism is noble if it means respect for the immigrant cultures that came together to form America, but multiculturalism will be lethal to our civilization if it means we must regard all cultures as equally valuable, equally worthy of emulation. Such phony "tolerance" deprives us of self-preservation. The head-hunters of New Guinea no doubt have something to teach us, but we have no need of the skill for shrinking heads.

Let's just hope that a lot more people in this nation are taking these observations to heart and are willing and ready to man the barricades of "civilization" against the barbarians who are waiting on the other side to unleash darkness, chaos, and death on our society.