RUTHFULLY YOURS

Modern education sets aside the pursuit of wisdom and truth in favour of the approved narratives, most particularly how wicked capitalists enforce inequality. Don’t expect a muscular defence of liberty from those whose minds were sealed shut before they could be opened.
Samuel P. Huntington, over twenty years ago in The Clash of Civilizations, argued, “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.” How prescient he was is proven by the fact that Western civilization and the culture it embodies and safeguards are under threat. Islamic terrorism, the impact of the culture wars and postmodernism, the rise of statism, the pervasive influence of celebrity culture and new technologies, to name a few, are all conspiring to undermine certainties and absolutes that, until recently, have stood the test of time.

The violence, death and destruction associated with Islamic terrorism both overseas and on Australian soil not only represents a physical threat; the nihilistic and evil ideology underpinning terrorist acts like 9/11 and the more recent murder of 21 Christians by Islamic state threaten democratic values and beliefs, since Magna Carta, that have evolved to safeguard the peace and prosperity of English speaking nations.

Even worse, apologists for those seeking to destroy our way of life refuse to acknowledge the true nature of Islamic terrorism, preferring to blame Western culture, supposedly, for excluding and marginalizing disaffected groups whose only recourse is to turn to violence. The cultural left, instead of developing a strong and convincing narrative about the strengths and benefits of Western culture (what is worth fighting for) engage in a narrative of self-recrimination and self-doubt. Whereas our universities and our schools were once committed to the pursuit of what Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy describes as “the best which has been thought and said”, given the impact of deconstruction and postmodernism, there are no longer any truths that we can hold in common or consider absolute.

The established disciplines of knowledge, instead of having any inherent meaning or worth, are simply socio-cultural constructs that enforce false consciousness and the hegemony of the ruling class. The purpose of education is not to seek wisdom or truth but to reveal how all relationships are based on power and how capitalist societies enforce inequality and disadvantage.

The latest carnage in Turkey comes as President Erdogan prepares to face the voters in a contest it is almost impossible to believe he can win. Will the man who destroyed freedom of speech, debased the judiciary and rode roughshod over secularism accept the will of his people?
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s despotic quest to become the indubitable boss of the Republic of Turkey, if the polls are to be believed, will be rejected at the November 1 parliamentary re-election. Even the Anatolian hinterland has, reputedly, gone cool on their one-time hero. Turkey’s homegrown demagogue increasingly appears to be more trouble than he is worth. Sectarian war, which Erdogan has been hell-bent on inciting since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) was denied a plurality at the June 7 parliamentary election, can hardly be in anybody’s interests except Erdogan’s. That is not to say, of course, that the crash-through-or-crash Erdogan is going to play by (what remains) of the rules of Turkish democracy and go quietly into the night.

Few modern-day politicians have been given the benefit of the doubt more than Erdogan. An Islamist firebrand in his days as mayor of Istanbul (1994 to 1998), he is on record from that period arguing “you cannot be secular and a Muslim” because “Allah, the creator of the Muslim, has absolute power and rule”. A four-month spell in jail in 1999 for contravening Turkey’s Kemalist (secular) constitution gave Erdogan a chance to rethink his political strategy and, until recently, he insisted that the ideology of the AKP was not Islamist but “social conservatism” mixed with “economic liberalism”.

Šid, Serbia — Mohammad Jamal al-Mousa would say his home was in Aleppo, but bombs from Bashar al-Assad’s planes razed the house. So now, just his family remains there, he says nervously. He thinks the place he left them is relatively safe. He still calls often.

Standing under the shelter of a tent where migrants can stop to charge their phones, he shows me their pictures. His two daughters, the eldest 10, pose grinning in matching white tights, black skirts, and red shirts. One has red bows in her pigtails. His son, a little younger, sits between them. The five-month-old baby boy isn’t pictured.

Al-Mousa worries most for his daughters, growing up not only under Assad’s repressive regime but also as the Islamic State seizes large portions of Syria.

“Can you imagine a child seven years old, who has to be fully covered in a hijab?” he asks me. “They took away her childhood. I want my daughters to be educated and happy. Now, my children are so small, but they’ve learned what a bomb is, and they can recognize warplanes.”

ISIS is expected to execute 180 Assyrian Christians kidnapped as a part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign, international monitors report.

The terrorist group “has specifically targeted Assyrians, looking to drive them out of their millennia-old communities,” according to the Christian Post. Reuters reports that the captives were taken from northeastern Syria in February, and that three of them were executed last month in conjunction with an Islamic holiday. Negotiations intended to secure their release for a ransom have been “suspended due to [ISIS’s] unbearable demands,” Assyrian Human Rights Network executive director Osama Edward said.

The news comes about two weeks after Russia began bombing actions in Syria to assist Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime. Though the Kremlin claims the campaign is intended to fight terrorism in the country, Russian jets appear to be targeting the U.S.-backed anti-Assad rebels instead of ISIS. For months, the Obama administration has been bombing ISIS while calling for Assad’s departure from power, so Russia’s actions put the two nations at cross-purposes in Syria.

On Sunday, Russian president Vladimir Putin mocked President Obama’s efforts to bolster the Free Syrian Army (FSA). “It would have been better to give us $500 million,” Putin said. “At least we would have used it more effectively from the point of view of fighting international terrorism.”

How did Vladimir Putin — with his country reeling from falling oil prices, possessing only a second-rate military, in demographic free-fall, and suffering from an array of international sanctions — find himself the new play-maker of the Middle East?

Putin’s ascendency was not foreordained. It followed a series of major U.S. miscalculations and blunders of such magnitude that it almost seems they must have been deliberate.

What exactly was our road to perdition in the Middle East?

1. Reset with Putin

When Barack Obama came into office, the outgoing Bush administration had crafted a moderate response to Putin’s aggression in Ossetia. The U.S. had made missile-defense agreements with the Czech Republic and Poland. Some Georgian forces were airlifted by the U.S. from Afghanistan back home. Indeed, at the time, many liberals complained that America was too soft on Putin. Perhaps. But the Obama administration entered office claiming the exact opposite, suggesting that the Bush pushback was part of a needless American-caused estrangement from Russia.

Pushing the plastic reset button was Hillary Clinton’s sad gesture signaling Putin and his team that Bush was gone, that a new, more receptive administration was in power — and thus that relations must naturally improve. Putin was somewhat perplexed, given that he knew Russia was to blame for the new estrangement. Naturally, then, he saw the Obama–Clinton reset grandstanding as more critical of America’s past behavior than of Russia’s present aggression — a fact that fueled Putin’s further calculations that he could safely move into Crimea and Ukraine.