When I read John C. Wright

I want to give up blogging.  I mean, what's the point?  When he says it so much better than I could on my best day.  Here he is in a quick little post, poking a finger in the eye of the post-Christian, liberal tendency to shame and deride the wars of Europe, such as the Crusades, while giving a pass to other cultures, like that of Islam, that were every bit as bad.

This is the result of multi-culturalism.  It was hitting its strides in the 1980s when I was in college, spurned on by professors who had, in their day, been blowing their minds at Woodstock or bringing liberal values to the world through the Peace Corps.  The premise was clear: White, European, Christian, Heterosexual (a later addition) Men were the nothing so much as the incarnation of total evil and the singular cause of all human suffering in the world.  All other civilizations were superior in every way, with lovely people with buff bodies and perfect hair, running about the world in loin clothes, making love under the stars, and chanting John Lennon songs all day.

If you want to see this in action, you could do worse than watching Dances With Wolves, or Disney's Pocahontas for examples.  Scholarship is also on board.  A few years ago, the BBC produced a well made documentary of India.  Interesting stuff.  But I couldn't help but notice that MC tendency to downplay the atrocities committed by any civilization that wasn't European.  But when the Brits arrived in India, it was Cue the Darth Vader march, and that's where the evil came in.  Likewise, I watched a PBS documentary some years ago in which the scholars pointed out that Europeans who came to the New World didn't just come to rape and pillage and spread disease and genocide.  They also came to ravage nature, destroy forests, and upset the climate!  Those Europeans just can't do anything right!

Mr. Wright focuses on the condemnation of conflicts like the Crusades.  The hypocrisy of smacking down Europe's heritage of defense or war while giving others a pass.  But it's only part of the overall mega-message with which progressives have convinced a growing number of Westerners that the best thing for the world would be the eradication of everything to do with Western Civilization (esp. Christianity and the Catholic Church).

One note I will add.  This applies to America and Protestant Christians, too.  I'm sometimes shocked at how willing Catholics are to drudge up the worst possible interpretation or take on things done by America or Protestant culture.  Same basic take: The Catholic Church in the Medieval era was misunderstood and totally within its rights, but America?  Ha!  There's an evil nation of unjust wars and genocides and evil and all that!  Don't do it, since America and the West, Protestantism and Christianity are all seen as the same by those who wish to disassemble them all.  A lesson many Evangelical Christians had learned, and that helped me see Catholic history in a whole new light.