Without laying my cards on the table in respect of my forthcoming article on the matter, let me at least refer to that ‘giant’ of the Enlightenment, Voltaire.

Picking up on Locke’s obsession with the ‘Law of Toleration’, Voltaire graced us with these sorts of observations:

“What is toleration? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies—it is the first law of nature.

“When, on the exchange of Amsterdam, of London, of Surat, or of Bassora, the Gueber, the Banian, the Jew, the Mahometan, the Chinese Deist, the Brahmin, the Christian of the Greek Church, the Roman Catholic Christian, the Protestant Christian, and the Quaker Christian, traffic together, they do not lift the poniard against each other, in order to gain souls for their religion. Why then have we been cutting one another’s throats almost without interruption since the first Council of Nice?

“My friends, when we have preached toleration in prose and in verse, in some of our pulpits, and in all our societies—when we have made these true human voices resound in the organs of our churches—we have done something for nature, we have re-established humanity in its rights; there will no longer be an ex-Jesuit, or an ex-Jansenist, who dares to say, I am intolerant.”

Regrettably, it is precisely this sort of ‘enlightened naiveté’ which has given rise to the problems you identify. I suppose we could even say, trying not to be too unkind to the likes of Voltaire, that they gave us appeasement – in bucket loads. Today it is a mark of reprobation to be branded ‘intolerant’ – no matter how decadent and despicable the thing you will not tolerate happens to be.

Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com

Nietzsche wonderfully rectified this delusion with this: “In the Jewish ‘Old Testament’ the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it. With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was, and will have sad thoughts about ancient Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe, which wants by all means to signify as against Asia the ‘progress of man’.”

Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com

But I am pleased that you have raised an issue that will, sooner or later confront us – ‘total war’.

This is what I said in my article “Free Speech, the War on Terror and Islam” (www.freedomvrights.com) several years ago:

“We must not recoil from contemplating a clash of civilizations; a war between the West and Islam. Neither should we recoil from contemplating ‘total war’. In Nazi Germany and Japan during the Second World War, ideologies became so deeply rooted that only absolute defeat could exterminate them. We must consider to what extent we are prepared to defend ourselves. We must ask ourselves whether we are prepared to see thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of our young men and woman die or be disfigured. We must ask ourselves whether we are prepared to say, as Bomber Harris did in the Second World War: “I would not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” We must ask ourselves whether, in the last analysis, we are prepared to support the thinking behind President Truman’s decision to authorize the use of nuclear weapons against Japan to minimize American, and Japanese, casualties.

“Our adversaries should know before they escalate hostilities, or refuse informed debate, that, as Admiral Yamamoto observed after Pearl Harbor: “We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve”.”

So, in that respect, I agree with your analysis. But, as I have said, certainly not on the Enlightenment (although perhaps we can return to that issue after the next article).

Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com

Sad, it is true. But if they would rather twere them or us, I chose us, and (unlike liberals) I have no guilt abt surviving.

- musculus
(P.S.: PDA spell checker not working, please excuse mispellings {grin} -mm)