Alle historiske veje fører til Rom

“Vi er blevet tilfredse. Vi er et glemsomt samfund. Vore bedsteforældre, selv mens de nød Efterkrigstidens fremgang, huskede krig og depression. Men i dag er vi så langt væk fra det. Især de mennesker, der leder os, lever i en evig nutid, i et utopisk øjeblik, i en forestilling om, at nuet vil vare evigt. Og alt i vores kultur har til hensigt at retfærdiggøre denne leven i nuet. ” Mark Steyn i et JP interview 2 oktober 2010.

Mark Steyn har ikke altid ret, men når han er skarp, er han knivskarp. Lige som romerne før Roms fald, hviler vi mageligt på laurbærene. For at blive i sammenligningen, så var de tilbage dengang i Romerriget heller ikke helt ubevidste omkring, hvor det bar hen. De foretrak bare at ignorere det og feste videre.
Her et citat fra William Durants Verdens kultur historie, bind 10, side 57.

“Det var i disse år, Synesius fra Kyrene, halvt kristen biskop, halvt hedensk filosof, i en tale til Arcadius’ luksus-elskende hof i Konstantinopel med klarhed beskrev de muligheder, Grækenland og Rom stod overfor. Hvorledes kunne kunne riget overleve, hvis dets borgere unddrog sig militærtjeneste og overdrog dets forsvar til lejetropper, som blev rekrutteret fra selvsamme folkeslag, som truede riget? Han foreslog, at man opgav luksus og behagelighed og hvervede eller udskrev en hær af borgere, som var villige til at kæmpe for land og frihed. Han opfordrede Arcadius og Honorius til at knuse de overmodige barbariske stammer og drive dem tilbage til deres huler bag Sortehavet, Donau og Rhinen. Hoffet hilste denne tale med klapsalver, som havde det været en elegant retorisk præstation, og vendte så tilbage til fornøjelserne.”

Ovenstående var mens man havde skrevet en våbenhvile med Alaric, der holdt fire år. i 401 rykker han ind i Italien og undviger kun at overfalde Rom mod en bestikkelse. Den Romerske hærfører Stilichos kunne egentlig have besejret ham tilbage i år 395 og senere i 397, hvor han måtte haste til Afrika for at slå et oprør ned. Denne gang mødes de i flere slag uden sejrherre, som dog sendte Alaric på flugt.
Af ren paranoia henretter man Stilichos i 408, hvorefter banen er ryddet for Alaric og Rom falder.

Problemerne i dag og dengang er ikke helt de samme, ikke endnu fristes man til at sige, hvad angår kompositionen af hæren.
I dag vil vi undgå at føde vores egne børn og arbejde i lavtlønnede ufaglærte jobs, den slags har vi folk til, mens vi hygger os som et andet moderne aristokrati og borgerskab.

Men den manglende villighed til at afbryde festen og hyggen, for at gøre noget ved problemer, den har ikke forandret sig. Lige som man dengang kunne ignorere Alaric, og mellem 1936 og 1939 ignorere Hitler så lang tid det gik. Lige så sikkert er det, at problemerne bliver skudt til side og ignoreret i fremtiden, så lang tid det nu kan lade sig gøre.

For gentagelsen skyld, her er de ti negationistiske teknikker, i hovedtræk fra en bog af Koenraad Elst, der vi fortsat vil stifte bekendtskab med inden for den historiske skildring af Islam:

1. Head-on denial: The crassest form of negationism is obviously the simple denial of the facts. This is mostly done in the form of general claims, such as: “Islam is tolerant”, “Islamic Spain was a model of multicultural harmony”, “the anti-Jewish hatred was unknown among Muslims until Zionism and anti-Semitism together entered the Muslim world from Europe”. Since it is rare that a specific crime of Islam is brought to the public’s notice, there is little occasion to come out and deny specific crimes. Exceptions are the Armenian genocide, officially denied in Turkey and the entire Muslim world.

2. Ignoring the facts: This passive negationism is certainly the safest and the most popular. The media and textbook-writers simply keep the vast corpus of inconvenient testimony out of the readers’ view.

3. Minimizing the facts: If the inconvenient fact is pointed out that numerous Muslim chroniclers have reported a given massacre of unbelievers themselves, one can posit a priori that they must have exaggerated to flatter their patron’s martial vanity – as if it is not significant enough that Muslim rulers felt flattered by being described as mass-murderers of infidels.

4. Whitewashing: When one cannot conceal, deny or minimize the facts, one can still claim that on closer analysis,, they are not as bad as they seem. One can call right what is obviously wrong. This can go very far, e.g. in his biography of Mohammed, Maxime Rodinson declared unashamedly that the extermination of the Medinese Jews by Mohammed was doubtlessly the best solution.

5. Playing up unrepresentative facts: A popular tactic in negationism consists in finding a positive but uncharacteristic event.

6. Denying the motive: Negationists sometimes accept the facts, but disclaim their hero’s responsibility for them. Thus, Mohammed Habib tried to exonerate Islam by ascribing to the Islamic invaders alternative motives: Turkish barbarity, greed, the need to put down conspiracies brewing in temples. In reality, those rulers who had secular reasons to avoid an all-out confrontation with the unbelievers, were often reprimanded by their clerical courtiers for neglecting their Islamic duty.

7. Smokescreen: Another common tactic consists in blurring the problem by questioning the very terms of the debate: “Islam does not exist, for there are many Islams, with big differences between countries etc.” It would indeed be hard to criticize something that is so ill- defined. But the simple fact is that Islam does exist: it is the doctrine contained in the Quran, normative for all Muslims, and in the Hadis, normative at least for all Sunni Muslims. There are differences between the law schools concerning minor points, and of course there are considerable differences in the extent to which Muslims are effectively faithful to islamic doctrine, and correspondingly, the extent to which they mix it with un- islamic elements.

8. Blaming fringe phenomena: When faced with hard facts of Islamic fanaticism, negationists often blame them on some fringe tendency, now popularly known as fundamentalism. This is said to be the product of post-colonial frustration, basically foreign to genuine Islam. In reality, fundamentalists like Maulana Maudoodi and Ayatollah Khomeini knew their Quran better than the self-deluding secularists who brand them as bad Muslims.

9. Arguments ad hominem: If denying the evidence is not tenable, one can always distort it by means of selective quoting and imputing motives to the original authors of the source material.

10. Slogans: Finally, all discussion can be sabotaged with the simple technique of shouting slogans: prejudice, myth, “racism/communalism”.

Koenraad Elsts bog her:

http://voiceofdharma.org/books/negaind/

Jeg har det lidt på samme måde som Flemming Rose, alle argumenter er fremført til hudløshed, det som mangler er viljen til at indse, “at nuet ikke varer evigt.” Og “Islam ikke er en hyggelig lille religion” – harmløs som Jainismen.