On Israel and bombing

The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellowcountrymen resisted Hitler's bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world.

Liberalism and Religion

Broadly speaking, two currents in liberal political thought about religion emerged from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the age of the Enlightenment. One tendency, particularly strong in England and America, sought to develop a political framework of religious liberty that would accommodate diverse faiths. The second tendency, particularly strong in France, identified religion with superstition and unreason and attacked clerical power.

The first was the spirit of Locke, the second that of Voltaire; the first, liberalism toward religion; the second, liberalism against religion. The first called for a shared public sphere, the second for a secular public sphere. The first sought to release minority faiths from the tyranny of the established faith; the second sought to release science, education, and the mind itself from all faith and dogma. The first culminated in the American Revolution, the second in the French Revolution.

[Paul Starr, FREEDOM’S POWER - The History and Promise of Liberalism, pg:75]

The Age of Reason

Napoleon to Paine: "a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe."

Chapter 2

It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow-citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.
 

The circumstance that has now taken place in France, of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest, in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.

Identities

Thus Turks in Anatolia before 1900 were largely unaware of a separate 'Turkish' identity — separate, that is, from the dominant Ottoman or the overarching Islamic identities - and besides, local identities of kin, village or region were often more important.

[Anthony Smith, National Identity, pg:31]

Quotes

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority oj the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.

-- J. S. Mill

Europe seemed incapable of becoming the home of free States. It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of State -ideas long locked in the breasts of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios, -burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man.

-- Lord Acton

Liberalism is no religion, no world view, no party of special interests.
It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas.
It is no world view because it does not try to explain the cosmos and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence.
It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group.
It is something entirely different..
-- Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition

Lupus est homo homini.
--Plautus

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.
-- J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan, 1936, p. 383

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?
-- F. A. Hayek

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell

Marxism has led to Fascism and National Socialism because, in all the essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism. 
-- F. A. Voigt

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

[Alexis de Tocqueville]

(below passage shows how this thinker is hugely close-minded against islam and how little he knows about and understands islam.)

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others. 

[Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One, Chapter V]

What is Fascism?

TRIBUNE - 1944

Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’

One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism’. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.