Tuesday, December 05, 2006

All That Wasted Culture-Money

(fabian pascal) Iraq IS a debacle because america knows and cares little about other cultures and peoples. Americans have always failed to learn and understand other cultures due to the belief of their own indoctrination that they are the best in everything. For all the altruistic pretentions, the US public cares only about itself.

(Bilgeman) You're quite right.

I've lived and traveled abroad since childhood, since 1969, to be precise, and I've learned nothing whatsoever about ANY of the cultures I've lived, worked, and traveled in.

Thanks ever so much for reprising the "Americans as Cultural Barbarians" meme.

– Thread More on the MSM on Gates of Vienna, November 27, 2006


Among the banners of the Left is the banner of cultural diversity. They preach leaving the “parochial isolation of the culture of the West” in favor of a wider, cosmopolitan view. They say non-Western cultures should be not merely the subject of study by the average Westerner, but the subject of fair study. By this they mean to say that the sin of Western colonialism was not always ignorance of other cultures, but often the study of other cultures through a Western lens, for the purpose of better ability to subjugate them (that, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Edward Said in his masterpiece of intellectual terrorism, Orientalism).

One would think that, four decades after the Radical Revolutions of the 1960’s, the West would be well-versed in the culture of any “other”. One would be right: the imperative of cultural diversity has been so thoroughly internalized that even questioning it is anathema. How, then, can we still have the above state—and that commenter echoes the sentiment of many—that a Western country is accused of cultural ignorance?

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In full on Our Children Are The Guarantors »

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