It was kind of weird to have been standing in the exact same spots as the terrorist attack victims had been when an Islamic lunatic hell-bent on Crusader revenge from the Middle Ages, ran his car into them in London, England near the Parliament building just a few feet from where Prime Minister Theresa Mays was speaking. After all, there were so many places in the world, and so many streets where something like that could have happened, yet it occurred on the exact walking path that my wife and I had just taken and the images where still fresh in our minds from our trip. I found myself wishing that this had happened when I was there so I could have done something about it. So close, yet so far away. I did warn of this very thing as I was reporting what I saw in London, and Paris from that same trip and with all the Muslim people at all levels of activity within those two very liberal cities—the writing was on the wall. You just can’t mix the religion of a Medieval origin with a forward-thinking civilization scratching at the ceiling of space and expect them to assimilate well together. And that’s what’s happening. There is a war between the east and the west and one side is going to win, and one side will lose as earth becomes one thing or another and those are the raw facts. For many thousands of years, we’ve run from each other after one battle to another and now the world is just too small, and until we move into space, the fight between the two fundamentally different philosophies will battle it out in our city streets for supremacy. We will never get along.
I of course am a white representative of western culture and my background is from the roots of that civilization—so obviously, I think its superior to all forms of eastern thinking. With that said, Christianity is an “eastern” concept. It is not an idea born of western civilization as so wonderfully articulated by the 1150 AD art of Wolfram von Eschenbach and a few other writers who expressed the romance of the troubadours for about 100 years before the Catholic Church built their cathedrals all over England and ruled everything through the Church for the next thousand years. We wouldn’t see another period like Eschenbach’s nobility, chivalry and romance in story form until the American western rose up for another 100-year period from about 1850 AD to 1950 AD for exactly the same reasons, to express the desires of the truly free, and western heart specific to the culture of Cro-Magnon man that evolved after the Ice Age in north western Europe—specifically. The ideas forged in that region of the world were unique and very different from the rest of the world which has largely been shaped for all of human history by oriental thought. So let that be a qualifier of my thinking and I have studied both in their various aspects and I see their values respectively—but clearly.
Also keep in mind that I respect people who need religion to hold together their otherwise unstable lives. It is too much to ask most people to live a good life without the fear of everlasting damnation motivating their private actions—so religions—especially for unstable people, is vastly important to maintaining a civil society which was the argument of the Church of England that was all too happy to abandon the romance of Arthurian legends in favor of the sacrament of Christ provided by the clergy. In the modern era, progressives did the same only their church was that of government as the bureaucrat replaced the Church clergy for the same distribution of sacrament.
However, I am not going to abandon what I think are superior values—as expressed by the individualism of western culture for the “sacrament” of eastern religions—for which Islam and Christianity are but a few. And what is going on in London, Paris, and all over Europe is a clash of western ideas which are more underground these days, and superimposing them with a collision of the obvious surface eastern way of thinking collectively. For instance, in France it is quite common to see a woman on the beach topless. What she is doing in that situation is stating that she is an independent woman functioning from her passionate self-recognition. But the religious background of the modern progressive will say that her nude state is a reflection of the collective essence for which we all are and her sexuality does not belong to one man, or lover—but to the world—that is the sacrificial aspect of it that came to the region from its long history with eastern infused religions—which essentially came from the Roman Empire trying to hold everything together in the last few hundred years of its existence. The surface argument that many have about the topless women at French beaches is first of the morality of the nudity—which is fear of the Church—(Christianity and Islam). But then there is that ancient troubadour history of western culture that inspires the woman to stand against those institutions proudly declaring to the world that she is a product of her own inclinations. That’s why today we have all these kids looking like tattooed pin cushions declaring their individuality from the traditions of our past even through they are copying each other for the look—because they don’t know how to break down all these influences in their lives—because they are all stacked in dysfunctional ways. That makes Islam’s simplicity appealing—which is a means of recruiting and why this problem is currently exploding.
In the confusion of our modern times western civilization has felt it had to apologize for the crimes of the Church during times of imperialist rule, through the Romans, then through the English and French Empires where Catholic missionaries did to the world what Islamic radicals are doing now—converting the world to their version of an eastern religion inherited from Zoroastrianism—and the cultures of the Indus Valley well before the times of the Greek. Christianity and Islam in fact are children of Zoroastrian religion, so they are not new to the human race but only the most recent embodiment of religion for the times of those large empires—which are outdated and useless to mankind in 2020 AD. It was nice that Muslims preserved the work of Aristotle from the destruction of the Library in Alexandria by Roman radicals—but as far as original contributions, there is nothing innovative about Islamic culture that makes it more special to anybody else. The same angel Gabriel as he did in the Bible was behind the shaping of Islam, so there isn’t anything really to fight over between Muslims and Christians that demand death. Their rivalry is no different from that of a sport franchise between two teams within a 100 miles of each other. They have a lot more in common than not. If the religion produces zealots’ intent on murder, then the whole enterprise should be abandoned as a state religion. No country should put their name on such a thing because it’s an outdated concept that has brought more harm to the human race than not.
My personal values which I share with many people in western civilization is that the original concepts of Wolfram von Eschenbach, of personal bliss and defying the authority of institutional barriers is a human concept that deserves its time in the sun. The eastern religions promise more of the same kind of trouble that has soaked mankind in blood from its inception. Even though they preach peace often in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity and all the variants in between—the result is often war because each attaches itself to state sponsorship and politics—which then become something not so sanctimonious. In the case of London, the terrorist who attacked so many people in the heart of that nice historic city wanted to use fear to convert people to his religion—and to impose the black flag of ISIS over the state symbols of the Christianized Europe that unleashed the Crusades on the Middle East centuries ago. It’s time to stop, and to insist on that stoppage loudly. No member of Islam has a right to murder other people in the name of God. And for the liberals who have been running England and France, you cannot mix the religions of the east with the innate passions of the individualized west—because even in the most ardent liberal—the topless woman on a French beach—there is a little bit of the Arthurian romances in them—and they’ll never assimilate with the religions of the east. Ever. It’s not in their DNA.
There will be no conquest of western civilization as ISIS fantasizes about—especially through fear because they don’t understand what makes us tick as a species of “westerners.” The moment we were free of the Church of England in America we developed into the frontiersman and cowboys of cinema that is the innate condition of our people—our heritage. And regarding that particular mentality, it is better to destroy 1 million collectivists than to break the heart of one individual who is trying to live authentically according to their bliss. A marriage between two people in love by their choice is better than an arranged marriage to bring two tribes together under the premise of oriental philosophy—which has been the common practice of the Church for many years both in Islam and Christianity. When it comes to values, individuals take the world forward. Collectivists take it back—every time—it’s the classic Vico cycle—theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, anarchy—then back again to the beginning as Orientals have been doing for thousands of years.
When we talk about the “west” we are not talking about London as it is today. Radical terrorists aren’t attacking the concept of the west as they think they are when they kill innocent people outside of Parliament. Because that old idea of the “west” is much deeper in our culture than any surface reaction to collectivist religions. And the centerpiece of that value system is that the individual is more valuable than a collective ideology. More minds do not make something better—it makes it worse because it forces an inauthentic experience. So when we look at trying to assimilate Islam with the “west” it will never work. It can’t work. A choice between the two has to be made and that choice was made on the battlefields—and Islam lost over and over again. And it always will because collectivists do not beat individuals They can only win in mass force—they cannot win in ideology and that is why Islam no longer works and should be tossed aside in favor of something else. If that religion can’t be more constructive for the meager minds that adhere to it for their own personal faults—then the religion needs to be dropped from state sponsorship and pushed from the human experience—so we can deal with the real problems of the human race—and not this contrived religion from the Middle Ages.
Islam is at war with the west and they aren’t looking to make peace. They are on a mission to convert as many people to Islam through any means and they won’t stop until they are all killed or accomplish their task. Catholic missionaries did this before, and it caused a lot of trouble around the world. Now Islam is doing it and they will accomplish the same results. Because people don’t want to be killed, they’ll tell the Islamic terrorists whatever they want to hear, but what’s in their hearts will be something else. And just like people cheat on their spouses and do anything and everything out of rebellion from whatever religion they come from—life in the west has at its core a need for rebellion. And that isn’t a new thing, it comes from our Cro-Magnon experience to always push whatever limits we are presented with—and that is what advances society. Not that cheating on a spouse is a good thing, it’s not, but when the marriage becomes to the human mind an instrument of the state—the romance leaves the marriage, and rebellion in some way is the mode of western thinking. The oriental religion of Islam won’t work for the west and it’s too late to go back. So we either go to all-out war with Islam to preserve the west—or we go extinct. There is no middle way as liberals like to think. The two cultures just don’t assimilate because their evolutional trajectories are going in radically different directions.
Rich Hoffman
CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
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Before there was ever an Indiana Jones movie my teachers were telling me through those scholastic aptitude tests you take in elementary school that my three most likely occupations that I was most suited for were as an archaeologist, a test pilot, and a daredevil. Of course those last two they didn’t take very seriously, but the first came after watching me with the other kids at COSI in Columbus where I often went off by myself to study things that interested me and I asked questions from the workers that were unexpected. Over the years my wife talked me away from being a professional daredevil which has cheapened the cost of owning a car—so that’s a good thing. Being a test pilot required training in the military and that is way too conformist for me. On the skill side, it would be no problem, but on the taking orders side—forget it. And archaeology didn’t pay enough. I wanted a family and I like to spend time with them, so running all over the world getting dirty all the time for very little money wasn’t appealing as a career. But I do enjoy it as a hobby and have never really put it away. As a kid I grew up in Liberty Township and watched many neighborhoods develop over top of Indian burial mounds which didn’t bother me much because I like seeing new things come from the human race. But the land that I grew up on always seemed to me to be holding some key to civilization that needed to be unlocked, so when opportunities came for me to live in different places around the world like New Zealand, New York, Los Angeles and Florida came up—I passed because I honestly feel like I live in one of the best places in the world—and I’ve traveled plenty to know the difference.
It was a rare treat to come home for the weekend on a Friday and to have a stack of really good books to read on a subject where I had a lot to learn. My oldest daughter and I had been talking about this problem recently while dining at a very nice restaurant in London—that books were getting harder to read for me as I get older because most of them seem so trite and unimaginative. I blame the publishing industry on that problem as they continue to put out the same contorted material to fit neatly into the turbulent social conditions of our day—instead of pushing against those limits to actually expand human culture. But I did manage to find some great books in the literary capital of the world which for me was like a drink of water after walking in the desert for three days. But the biggest jolt came while I was at the Stonehenge site off to the west of London. It wasn’t just the stone monuments that had my mind racing—it was the entire area and the way that the English Heritage group had built the new welcome center—which removed the tourists from Stonehenge and put them a mile away giving visitors an excellent overview of the entire countryside. And to me that countryside felt remarkably like my home in Ohio—so much so that as soon as I returned home I bought three books that I had been thinking about for quite a while—yet didn’t really have the time to give to them.
I think most stunning, and surprising for me was in seeing just how many mound sites with very precise earthworks existed, particularly in Portsmouth, Ohio, West Virginia and on up to Marietta. I’ve been to many of the sites, but seeing them all in the same book really puts a point on the issue and shows what a vast and complex culture we are dealing with here. That’s the reason I was so shocked at Stonehenge. I had wanted to go there for years but just didn’t have the time to get there. So when the opportunity arose, it was at the top of my list because it always felt like a key to something and the reports I read in my books as a youth were coming from very new assumptions. But I was clearly able to see that the culture at Stonehenge was precisely the same culture that had built Newark, Serpent Mound and the Miamisburg Mound. And on that note I was very shocked to learn that a mound the size of the Miamisburg Mound was literally right across the river from my house all covered up in trees near a road I’ve driven down likely a million times yet it’s always been hidden there in plain sight my entire life. It’s remarkable if it is placed into this larger story. By itself people just write it off as an old Indian relic, but taken as a portion of a very vast culture all over North America it begins to take on added significance.
Welcome home. Thanks for sharing your adventures. I enjoyed it. And this blog is right on. I like to mention to my friends who talk about God’s will that God made us in his image and he wants us to USE our minds to advance… that usually gives those who think some pause and some appreciation for those of us who enjoy using our “God Given” talents to acquire things that we want and value. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Keep it up.
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Thanks Mike. These are difficult concepts for a lot of people and travel does help sort through things by coming out of a comfort zone to provide new observations. And there is no place like America! That’s for sure.
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Very Interesting.
I definitely see your side and have always bought what we wanted but always with cash. No payments. We have a nice house, 10 cars including a vette, a farm and 18 other properties in different states. (investment)
All payed for. My sister lives in the UK so I know what you’re experiencing.
Since my parents came home from Florida and caring for them, I have a serious new appreciation for what it will take for retirement and that’s if you’re healthy! We were thinking 4 million. It’s always been our goal. We are WAYY off! And with this screwed up healthcare, it’s harder to gauge.
You’re young. I have 9 years on you. As you get older (and after your 50’s) things move at lightening speed. You’ll process differently after 55. I’ve had conversations with friends and they did as well. I suppose it’s a wonderful natural progression. My husband is also a financial genius, but we curved our wants for the future a couple years back. We are completely happy and financially solid, until we’re not. That’s universal.
Our strategy has always been to buy things that will value us later.
As for the Iphone….I don’t want to own anything smart. I don’t have a smart meter anymore )i payed dearly for that), got rid of my Samsung smart phone, no smart car, no smart gun, refrigerator, thermostat, or anything else like that. Unlike others, my life is more interesting and better without those things.
Keep it simple~
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You are still a young woman, and you’re right about retirement. I wouldn’t even think about it with less than $10 million dollars in the bank and not spoken for anywhere. Because the health care costs are just out of control. Ridiculous!
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I meant to mention because it’s important to my point…that I have complete POA of my parents financial and medical. We do not pay a dime as of now to care for them. But handling all of their affairs is a real eye-opener and an experience most children don’t get. He did a great job of providing for themselves, but you have to make sure those investments keep paying. Very scary and completely changed our strategy.
Another difference is that we’ve been savers…always. As have they. Most people my age have not. Even scarier.
Mind your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.
True that!
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