Liberals try to root out root causes -- and fail

By Aussiegirl

In a wonderful article in today's American Thinker, Professor Donald Baker exposes the roots of
suicidal guilt which has plagued European and Western civilization for centuries. Granted, we have elevated this collective guilt to an art form, but it is evidently nothing new. Don't miss this enlightening and bracing article.

Last week I watched a History Channel program that dealt with the Viking invasions of Europe. It occurred to me that one of our main problems
in responding to the Muslim menace is rooted in the sorry
Judeo-Christian miasma of guilt, from which the Muslim doesn't
suffer.

The prayers of the European victims began with "God save us from the
fury of the Northmen!" or some variation. Then the prayers were
accompanied by penance, for the assumption was that they, the victims,
had sinned and that the Vikings were being permitted by God to punish
them – or some such nonsense. In some areas penance included
driving out the God-killers, the Jews. Our European ancestors didn't
advance as far as we have in searching for the root causes of their
misery, but they showed us the way. The root causes of the Viking
raids and invasions, of course, were simply that the Viking women did
the farming and cooking, and during the summer men could fish or go on
raids; raiding was much easier.

The Europeans were relatively wealthy through their hard work, and had
become the peaceful citizens of small towns. They were sitting ducks
for quick and bloody raids up the shallow rivers.

The Real Root Cause

The deeper root cause, of course, was greed combined with the fact that
the Vikings could get away with it. Moreover, it was in the nature of
their warrior society. What were the root causes of the various
dynasties of Mongols sweeping across seven thousand miles of nearly
barren plains to reach Poland? Or the root causes of Tamerlane's
conquest of southeastern Europe and the Middle East? In each case,
and also that of Alexander's conquests, the root cause was
megalomania and the warrior culture that produced it.

[...]On the days after 9-11 the academic halls and pulpits of America
were filled with vacuous maunderings about our guilt, our crimes
(stealing oil, murdering Iraqi children, etc.) which brought this attack
upon us – as in "chickens coming home to roost." There was earnest
arguing that the days of an-eye-for-an-eye were past. (I received two
absurd round-robin emails from my old university where Ward
Churchill holds forth urging me to sign a letter to President Bush
pleading that he do nothing.) Thousands bearing the burden of a Ph.D.
or D.D., or both, attempted to persuade the nation to lie still and
understand.

[..]A steady theme in all this guilt-mongering is, of course, Israel.
The Jews are the only semi-theological cause of catastrophe left to us
from the Middle Ages. As a medievalist, I feel very much at home in
the current atmosphere reading The New York Times, The Guardian,
Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and all the rest. I recall the days
of St. Hugh of Lincoln, when we could blame any otherwise inexplicable
unpleasant phenomena on the Jews. More recently, the Jews had a bit
of "good press" because of the Holocaust but of course that couldn't
last. The Jews are the most useful people in history; if we don't sin
ourselves then the Jews sin for us. I note that Mrs. Cindy Sheehan
has called for Israel to get out of Palestine and, one presumes, Israel
as well. All the Muslim problems stem from capitalism and democracy, in
both of which the Jews figure prominently. And there is always the
Zionist entity.

We have gone from "God save us from the fury of the Northmen" to "God
save us from the fury of al-Qaeda" and we still think it's all our
fault.