Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86

I my opinion such a strategy would bring peace even if it only partially implemented. Remember the islamic mindset respects the idea of troops killing civilians, they do not think like the rest of us.. If one encountered a typical saudi cleric the clerics first reaction would be to advocate your death. However if one confronts him and lined up his children to the wall and killed them, the cleric would find you worthy of right of coexistence, for you would have demonstrated your determination to use any means to protect your existence. For example, if we had nuked afghanistan after 9/11 "wiped it off the map" then invaded iraq using carpet bombing of baghdad, basra and mosul with our ground forces using einsatzgruppen-style tactics against the population there: iran would not be belligerent right now, instead they would of halted their nuclear program, and even offer to reestablish diplomatic relations for fear that we would turn on them next.

Also on another note when muslims recount the history of the mongol invasions, despite the fact that the khans were responsible for the deaths of millions of muslims and the decimation of much of islamic culture. The historians there do have somewhat of a respect for the mongol hordes.

CH86 - I have done horrific things for my country. While some nights it feels otherwise, I apparently can live with that. However, with what our country would become with your suggestions, I would rather Osama use my head in a game of Mongolian horse polo.

If '86 is an indication, you are a man now. Quit being so afraid. It tends to make one believe and do stupid things. Life is hard enough; don't carry that extra burden.

And, never forget: those who you suggest killing and maiming have faces -



Assalamu alaikum

You should read some indian sites, they known over many centuries what to expect from the "Religion of Peace". Historyofjihad and its affiliate waronjihad is ones I know of off the top of my head, but there are many others.

I have fears that hopes that the current peace are overly optimistic. I, like everyone else would prefer to live peacefully with the only reasonable worry toward my safety being everyday run of the mill crime (which in the town I live in is not a real problem). However is it unreasonable to get worried when you see fanatics and terrorists blow up buildings and attack schools, when you see thousands upon thousands being indoctrinated in the ideology of exterminating the west. So Yes I am scared.

I agree that JTF is a bigoted site, however I was looking for info regarding the islamist threat and I admit that i did not bother to read the rest of the site.

Actually I am NOT a republican. I voted for the democrats in both 04' and 06', as I believe the bushite policy of cultural diffusion is flawed and would not work on people who don't want to be "diffused". I am a believer in economic protectionism, a strong government, and a strong land based military. Values that are spat on by repubs and neocons.

That's interesting because I voted for that Kerry guy and I enjoy a delicious variety of milk-based products on a fairly regular basis.

I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree though on the basic utility of annhilating entire civilizations.

Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86

I have fears that hopes that the current peace are overly optimistic. I, like everyone else would prefer to live peacefully with the only reasonable worry toward my safety being everyday run of the mill crime (which in the town I live in is not a real problem). However is it unreasonable to get worried when you see fanatics and terrorists blow up buildings and attack schools, when you see thousands upon thousands being indoctrinated in the ideology of exterminating the west. So Yes I am scared.

And how do your fears stack against those of your grandparents' who saw millions perish in war? Or to even your parents' fear as children who practice duck-and-cover and as rebellious teenagers hung posters telling them the 10 most important things to do should the missiles come (-- the last being to tuck their heads between their legs and kiss their own asses goodbye)?

I'm not saying today's world is not a scary place; I'd be the last to say that. What I am saying is don't let that fear drive you to believe or do stupid things
including those that would make you ashamed if your grandchildren knew. Everyone eventually dies, its how you live and the values you choose to stand by that counts.

Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari

So as to give pause to the Jacksonian fevers on this topic and in an attempt to meet the hard and soft Hamiltonians and Wilsonians on a ground more agreeable I offer:



Iraq: Containment as “Plan B”


I would also renounce non-interventionism (often styled as isolationism by the Progressives) as a way of coming together if Mr. Trifkovic's application of the ideas of Mr. Geo. Kennan were to be applied to the containment of Eurasia, the Antipodes, the Lower Americas, and Africa. If those (and perhaps the Great White North as well) were all enveloped by Our Commercial Republic's numerous powers and allowed their internal struggles while keeping their ambitions from expanding outside the boundaries of Eurasia-the Antipodes-the Lower Americas-Africa-(GWN?) by a policy of containment I would join, in the spirit of moderation and compromise and working together for the common good that the Coming Crisis requires, the interventionist still reachable by reason in such an extensive program of containment.

It is an expansion of what won the Cold War and what is recommended for the Irakis by the fellow at Chronicles. But, it is time to think big in foreign policy and is this not quite large an enterprise? Will the T4T's saner interventionists join me in this program? Will you abandon meddling even as I give up my non-interventionism? I have made my move to the center; will you meet me there?

I see both your new ‘worldwide containment’ and your previous non-interventionism stances as both being substance of a dream state. I see Mr. Trifkovic as that state of early awakening from a dream state but not yet fully cognizant of surrounding reality.

Taking your dream state first -

No, I cannot join you in that dream. While Jefferson’s shinning-light-on-the-hill is minimalist intervention and is at the core of the values I hold out for my country, I have come to a hard reality. In the eyes of those that most fear and fight the globalization juggernaut, the Hamilton origins of the phenomenon will have it perceived as American long after its dominant face has become that of billions of Asians. The fearful ones will despise us and be fearless and relentless in their attacks against us ---- at first, in attempts to disconnect themselves from the juggernaut but, as their failure against the inevitable becomes evident even to them, they will continue solely for revenge. With that prospect, I will sleep better with my Jacksonian don’t-tread-on-me always close by if not directly under the pillow. However, while I can see scenarios still demanding possible Wilsonian endeavor, I will be much more circumspect and aware of the slippery slope that it can bring. And, I will try to push my way to forefront of the expanding mob wanting to get their hands on any future moron attempting to once again impose Bush’s pumped-up-on-steroids-and-crack-cocaine bastardized version of our 28th’s foreign policies.

In regard to Mr. Trifkovic’s awakening state --

There is much to agree with in his proposal, and it does move us from the dream state of ‘instantaneous withdrawal’ that so many seem to gather round like moths to a fire. But does replacing ‘withdrawal’ with ‘containment’ indicate a fully awaken awareness of how we get from 'here' to 'there'? From 'A' to 'Z'? Or as you may be more familiar with , from 'wooded tract' to 'prime farmland'? Is there's some magical light switch that we just flick and we arrive from running insurgency battles into the light of containment?

Perhaps our belief in the magic switch is derived from the very actions that got us into the mess. The decision to invade and the actual invasion came so very fast, and the march to Baghdad even faster. Have we been condition to believe that such quick processing to new equilibriums is 'normal' or that in applies equally well in reverse? As someone else suggested, do we just march out in mass the same way we marched in? At least with Trifkovic , we have the interim step of marching only to the borders and our garrisons.

If these are our assumptions, or worst, we have not even considered them, do we really have a clue as to full dimensions of the problem? Perhaps it is our collective subconscious that questions the existence of the magic switch that leaves us a little queasy in our assurances that the next Administration will be quick to find and flick the magical switch?

It would seem that switch would have many elements to its nature. Certainly, a military one -- history shows that a rapid disorganized retreat is a soldier’s most dangerous moment. Perhaps the political nature of our switch has some import as well? Perhaps there lies the question: By exclusively seeking or assuming the magical switch with its promised quantum leap to withdrawal or containment, does that, in fact, actually inhibit any change whatsoever?

Originally Posted by salsabob

CH86 - I have done horrific things for my country. While some nights it feels otherwise, I apparently can live with that. However, with what our country would become with your suggestions, I would rather Osama use my head in a game of Mongolian horse polo.

If '86 is an indication, you are a man now. Quit being so afraid. It tends to make one believe and do stupid things. Life is hard enough; don't carry that extra burden.

Thank you for serving, salsabob.

I fear our efforts may be wasted on poor CH, though. He's apparently too much of a coward to consider our words. We point out why he's wrong and, instead of describing logical flaws in our arguments, he goes and finds more 'friends' who 'agree with him' -- i.e., unsourced, disgusting, and dehumanizing propaganda, some written by unnamed sources who won't even take a nom de plume. In other words, more cowards like him who won't take responsibility for their tracts of fear and hate. He can't face the possibility that we might be right, so he refuses to read the texts we suggest -- but he insists we read his. And apparently if the enemy uses Nazism as a model, it is then permissible for him to do the same.

I would ask him to volunteer for the Marines, except I don't think I'd trust him with a gun. No matter how many times the DI would yell at him, I think he'd try to murder the first real Muslims he laid eyes on. "In defense of Western Civilization", of course.

To all the actual adults on this forum -- what changes should we make to our curriculum as the late-wave Millies and Homelanders pass through the educational system? What more can we do to make sure people don't reach the age of 21 willing to dehumanize themselves out of fear? The "multicultural" model built in the Second and Third Turnings seems inadequate to the task... we need something that both understands and empathizes with non-Western cultures while still expounding Western values. How can this be accomplished? Thoughts, anyone?

Originally Posted by catfishncod

Thank you for serving, salsabob.

I fear our efforts may be wasted on poor CH, though. He's apparently too much of a coward to consider our words. We point out why he's wrong and, instead of describing logical flaws in our arguments, he goes and finds more 'friends' who 'agree with him' -- i.e., unsourced, disgusting, and dehumanizing propaganda, some written by unnamed sources who won't even take a nom de plume. In other words, more cowards like him who won't take responsibility for their tracts of fear and hate. He can't face the possibility that we might be right, so he refuses to read the texts we suggest -- but he insists we read his. And apparently if the enemy uses Nazism as a model, it is then permissible for him to do the same.

I would ask him to volunteer for the Marines, except I don't think I'd trust him with a gun. No matter how many times the DI would yell at him, I think he'd try to murder the first real Muslims he laid eyes on. "In defense of Western Civilization", of course.

To all the actual adults on this forum -- what changes should we make to our curriculum as the late-wave Millies and Homelanders pass through the educational system? What more can we do to make sure people don't reach the age of 21 willing to dehumanize themselves out of fear? The "multicultural" model built in the Second and Third Turnings seems inadequate to the task... we need something that both understands and empathizes with non-Western cultures while still expounding Western values. How can this be accomplished? Thoughts, anyone?

My first thought: a Great Books of the World course. If we're teaching kids to read, we're teaching them to read *something.* This would be better than Dick & Jane, at least. Greeks, Romans, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Buddha, Augistine, Aquinas, Luther, Newton, Darwin, etc ... (Compare and contrast: the Iliad and the Mahabharata. "The difference is .... umpteen thousand pages." "Thank you, Jenny. You may sit down now.")

The Millennials and Homelanders might be taught the traditional Xian Just War Theories and I would add the North African Augustine of Hippo's instruction that one should not use human beings as objects.

If the GIs and Silents could contain the Celestials and the Rooskies and the Cubans and Nicaraguans and the easterly Germans and the Poles and the Magyars and the Balts and the Altaics and the Ethiopes and Angolans and the Vietnamese and the more boreal of the Hermit Kingdomers and the Albanians and several sorts of other Slavs, I think the Millennials and Homelanders would be up to containing the Eurasians, the Africans, the Antipodeans and the southerly Americans.

We did commercial business with most of the "contained" and had cultural relations with them as well. For instance the Rooskies sent us ballet dancers and we supplied them with fetters for those in the Lubyanka housing estates even as the long twilight struggle ensued.

I only wish to see containment scaled up to a more Progressive level so that Our Commercial Republic might remain ours, commercial and republican.

Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86

However is it unreasonable to get worried when you see fanatics and terrorists blow up buildings and attack schools, when you see thousands upon thousands being indoctrinated in the ideology of exterminating the west. So Yes I am scared.

You are absolutely correct in that lots of children in Islamic countries are receiving an indoctrination. For example, there are textbooks in Saudi Arabia that teach children that Jews and Christians are basically scum. That is something that my fellow liberals often ignore. It is a serious problem.

My problem is with your solution, which is to exterminate all Muslims -- men, women, and children. That is why everyone in the forum is getting so worked up about your posts. Maybe you are using hyperbola to make a point. But it just gives everyone the creeps.

And yes, there are good, decent Muslims out there. One in particular that I know pretty well works tirelessly for Toastmasters clubs in Northern Virginia, sings in operas, and is involved in Muslim/Jewish peace dialog groups.

Originally Posted by salsabob

I'm not saying today's world is not a scary place; I'd be the last to say that. What I am saying is don't let that fear drive you to believe or do stupid things
including those that would make you ashamed if your grandchildren knew. Everyone eventually dies, its how you live and the values you choose to stand by that counts.

Your comments remind me of an old Dragnet episode. Sgt. Friday lectures a couple of survivalist teenagers, and basically says, "You think things are crazy for you here in 2T? Let me tell you how they were not that long ago in 4T."

I'm not looking forward to what's to come, myself. But at least I know something's coming.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

My first thought: a Great Books of the World course. If we're teaching kids to read, we're teaching them to read *something.* This would be better than Dick & Jane, at least. Greeks, Romans, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Buddha, Augistine, Aquinas, Luther, Newton, Darwin, etc ... (Compare and contrast: the Iliad and the Mahabharata. "The difference is .... umpteen thousand pages." "Thank you, Jenny. You may sit down now.")

The Great Books have been tried before, but you can't read everything -- St. Augustine rambles incessantly, though there are deep thoughts buried in all that muck. The trick is to know what parts to read.

Expanding the Great Books to include non-Western sources is an excellent idea, but must be done carefully. It's easy to overwhelm a student, especially today. That's one reason I suggested Sun Tzu: it's not a hard or long read in any 20th-cent. translation, and packs a tremendous wallop. A number of Buddha's sermons are compact and powerful as well, and Confucius can be excerpted. The most sugar-coated way to start people into Islamic culture is the Thousand Nights and a Night; overtly religious tracts scare them, but Aladdin? Ali Baba and the Forty Theives? Sinbad the Sailor? Come on! (In '03, "Ali Baba" was code used by Iraqis to point out thieves to the Americans. It was one of the few shared cultural touchstones.) Then we can do some small tidbits of Avicenna, or Maimonides. And you can't understand where the Muslims started to lose their touch without The Incoherence of the Falylasufi, or the rebuttal, The Incoherence of the Incoherence... but those may be a little deep without a philosophy course first. All these are, of course, precisely the books our enemies don't want Muslims to read... the ones that would tell them what they did to be great in the first place, and what they have to do to be great again.

A risky but key aspect, IMHO, would be to also include the anti-Western books. It would have to be done carefully, but I think it would really seal the deal, so to speak. You need to have read thoroughly about who the Jews really were throughout history (not to mention the Gnostic and Freemason writings) before you hit Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion... but if you've internalized the essence of the Bible and the Talmud and the basics of Kaballah and the role of Jews in Sepharad and Germany and the Ottoman world... the Protocols can be seen as what they are: a sad joke.

The Communist Manifesto, an idea that once held promise and merit but is now in the dustheap. What is To Be Done?, Vladimir Ulyanov; see where that led. The Little Red Book, and its undermining only thirty years later by Deng. The ramblings of the postmodernists that claim our civilization is all a sham. Excerpts of Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto. And finally, the declarations of fatwa against all we hold dear. The idea would be that by the time (probably junior or senior year) that we hand them this final book, the one with all the criticisms and denials... the student will be well equipped to answer those criticisms, to know why our philosophies have stood while the critics' have fallen... and to know how we can continue the search for truth (including from those critical of us) without losing the core of who we are.

Is it indoctrination if part of the training is in how to prevent being indoctrinated by anyone?

Originally Posted by catfishncod

The Great Books have been tried before, but you can't read everything -- St. Augustine rambles incessantly, though there are deep thoughts buried in all that muck. The trick is to know what parts to read.

Expanding the Great Books to include non-Western sources is an excellent idea, but must be done carefully. It's easy to overwhelm a student, especially today. That's one reason I suggested Sun Tzu: it's not a hard or long read in any 20th-cent. translation, and packs a tremendous wallop. A number of Buddha's sermons are compact and powerful as well, and Confucius can be excerpted. The most sugar-coated way to start people into Islamic culture is the Thousand Nights and a Night; overtly religious tracts scare them, but Aladdin? Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? Sinbad the Sailor? Come on!

Would it be possible to hire Readers Digest to create a condensed version of the Great Books?

One of my better experiences in High School was with an experimental junior year "American Studies" course. They gathered the college track kids, merged the required History and English requirements together into a double length class, and tried to so something along the lines suggested above. Thing is, some of even the better kids had trouble with folk like Dylan and Thoreau. Reviewing a few song lyrics or Civil Disobedience was enough to push attention spans. Asking kids to wade through full length books written by and for alien cultures would be a lot.

How many people have open minds? These forums illustrate well enough how people cling to their home culture and native world views. Few enough can respect their Red or Blue opposite contemporary American way of perceiving things, let alone assimilate and honor ancient and dated wisdom.

I'd kind of like to see it tried. It would be a noble effort. I just don't know that in today's environment where you have to teach your kids how to balance checkbooks or they don't graduate and your budget gets cut it can be made to work...

I do hope that your assessments of the general desire for peace is correct and the AQ is viewed as just a bunch of dangerous nutters by the rest of the mideast and are eventually marginalized. However what if your wrong and the assessment given by myself and previously postulated by the commentators of belmont club jihadwatch and others proves to correct? THAT is the scenario I fear, for it would mean a total war to preserve our own survival. Yes I have been using messianic hyperbolic rhetoric to emphasise my point. We can only hope that the peoples of the world embrace peace and set an example to be followed for the rest of the century and beyond.

Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari

If the GIs and Silents could contain the Celestials and the Rooskies and the Cubans and Nicaraguans and the easterly Germans and the Poles and the Magyars and the Balts and the Altaics and the Ethiopes and Angolans and the Vietnamese and the more boreal of the Hermit Kingdomers and the Albanians and several sorts of other Slavs, I think the Millennials and Homelanders would be up to containing the Eurasians, the Africans, the Antipodeans and the southerly Americans.

We did commercial business with most of the "contained" and had cultural relations with them as well. For instance the Rooskies sent us ballet dancers and we supplied them with fetters for those in the Lubyanka housing estates even as the long twilight struggle ensued.

I only wish to see containment scaled up to a more Progressive level so that Our Commercial Republic might remain ours, commercial and republican.

Containment worked fine with opponents with tank divisions. Our economic system is fairly proficient at producing things like tanks. If the other guy has an infrastructure and values set intended to compete with the West in industrial production, 2GW and 3GW, he is toast. His values have to be primarily materialistic and economic enough to produce tanks. Once he builds the infrastructure required for tanks, he isn't going to want to lose it all by fighting a losing war. Working into a position to fight a winning war requires being better at economics and war fighting than the West.

Good luck with that.

Insurgency is a different beast again. If a population doesn't like a foreign presence, and is willing to hide insurgents among them, tanks aren't generally decisive. You need lots of boots on the ground. One soldier for every fifty civilians one is attempting to control is the rule of thumb. This is a lot harder to do than park a bunch of tanks behind a border to discourage the other guy. Our experiences in Iraq and Vietnam, and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, were different from NATO's containment role in Europe in the second half of the 20th Century.

Discouraging a dictator who controls a large infrastructure sufficient to build tank divisions in an inherently different military problem as opposed to forcing a population to accept a government it doesn't really care for.

I wish I had a full array of answers. I think the upcoming crisis will be about finding said answers the hard way. I'd throw out a few rules of thumb.

• Don't try to force foreign countries to accept a government their own people are not willing to fight for themselves. (Perhaps not an absolute rule, but expect trouble if you try it, and avoid it if at all possible.)
• If the threat isn't 2GW massed tank divisions, don't look to the Cold War containment strategy as the obvious answer.

And I might generalize the second point above as a classic dictum...

• Don't try to refight the last war. Weapons systems, strategies, tactics, values and worldviews that might have been adequate for one situation often do not apply well in entirely different circumstances.

Crises come when the solutions to the last crisis, learned under fire, forged into hard cultural rules in the following first turning, no longer work. Suggesting that we should simply apply the primary lesson learned from the last crisis war isn't going to work.

I think it's time for some of these kids to join the army or something.

I heard that if you sign up today you get to like totally save the world and be loved by all of humanity.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Would it be possible to hire Readers Digest to create a condensed version of the Great Books?

I can see it now...

...on my grandmother's bookshelf.

Right idea, wrong application, I think. (Though still a good idea, for Boomers and above.) Here are some random ideas that might be a little closer to the Millenial Experience...

* The Norton Anthology of the Great Books
* Cliff's Notes on: The 200 Greatest Books in History
* lj-feed: great_books
* Great Books @ youtube.com
* Great Books For Dummies
* Oprah's Great Books Club
* Great Books CurrentTV
* What's So Great About These Books, Anyway? (webcomic, updated Mondays and Thursdays)

... some of them might even be doable...

Originally Posted by catfishncod

Right idea, wrong application, I think. (Though still a good idea, for Boomers and above.) Here are some random ideas that might be a little closer to the Millennial Experience...

* The Norton Anthology of the Great Books
* Cliff's Notes on: The 200 Greatest Books in History
* lj-feed: great_books
* Great Books @ youtube.com
* Great Books For Dummies
* Oprah's Great Books Club
* Great Books CurrentTV
* What's So Great About These Books, Anyway? (webcomic, updated Mondays and Thursdays)

... some of them might even be doable...

Yep. While I respect the Millennials, breaking things down into sound byte sized potions and a much faster pace might be the essence of where they are at. I remember an interview with Lucas on the making of the original Star Wars (Episode IV). He said one of the things he was trying to do was find out how much information one can feed the audience without losing them. While he was explaining this, they played the attack of the 3 tai fighters on the Millennium Falcon as it escaped the Death Star. The kept cutting from the perspective of the gunners, to the furball driving the ship, to Leah operating the shields, and in a few seconds in each cut conveyed both information on how the battle was proceeding and a bit of emotion from the perspective of the character. Lucas claimed he kept pushing the pace, and hadn't hit the cognitive speed limit yet.

Then you go back to classic movies, perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird. Great acting. Great ideas. Sllloooowwww by modern standards. They would spend a couple of hours dancing around an issue. I mean, why watch MGM musicals when you can just do That's Entertainment?

Maybe someone should do computer animated Great Books exerts. Maybe start with the Death of Socrates, with the great man who taught loyalty to the state, how much individuals owe the state, and perhaps respecting great institutions. Maybe hint at the phalanx culture of the time, come home with your shield or on it, the notion that the State is greater than individuals. Then, maybe Thomas Jefferson could crash onto the set. Powers of government limited by individual rights. Freedom of speech. Power of the state derived from the consent of the governed. Not agreeing with a word you say, but defending to the death the right to say it...

Then cut to a discussion between Karl Marx and Andrew Carnegie. Start out with Carnegie's assertion that he was correct in paying nearly zilch wages to his workers, as Carnegie would use the money to build libraries, while the workers would just waste the money on gambling and beer. Have Marx get real sincere and real accurate with the suffering caused by capitalist excess, and predicting ever more severe recessions and depressions unless the workers overthrew the oppressors. Carnegie might quote Supreme Court rulings on the sanctity of the contract, on how the government could not interfere in the economy. Maybe Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. could step in, paraphrase his famous dissents, and say the Constitution does not say anything about contracts being sacred, that the arguments for laissez faire have no constitutional basis. We could end with Marx's predictions of how perfect a worker's paradise would be.

The desired lesson behind the lesson, aside from presenting a history of values to complement the history of names and dates, would be to push a notion that great men can be great, ahead of their time, possess extraordinary passion and power, and be seen as dead wrong a century or so downstream. Values are not permanent.

But values altering Truths are hard to teach. Doing so in sound byte size packages would require... a change in approach.

Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86

I do hope that your assessments of the general desire for peace is correct and the AQ is viewed as just a bunch of dangerous nutters by the rest of the mideast and are eventually marginalized. However what if your wrong and the assessment given by myself and previously postulated by the commentators of belmont club jihadwatch and others proves to correct? THAT is the scenario I fear, for it would mean a total war to preserve our own survival. Yes I have been using messianic hyperbolic rhetoric to emphasize my point. We can only hope that the peoples of the world embrace peace and set an example to be followed for the rest of the century and beyond.

Well, you start by actually studying objective accounts of Islamic history that actually deal with how many people believe what. If you continue to build your view of their militant religious fanatics from the perspective of our militant religious fanatics, you can get drawn into fanaticism. Thus, we keep proposing well rounded research.

David Plotz at Slate is currently doing a series, Blogging the Bible. While I'm not doing the entire bible, I was recently pulled into reading Ezekiel Chapter 16. It is a metaphor of Jerusalem as a woman. She was born a bastard. She was thrown into the dust to live in poverty through her childhood. Upon flowering, once God noticed she had breasts, he pulled her out of the dust, gave her a bath, gave her fine jewelry, and gave her a place among nations.

And what did Jerusalem do? She shunned God and became a whore.

God was displeased.

35: Therefore, harlot, hear the word of the LORD!

36: Thus says the Lord GOD: Because you poured out your lust and revealed your nakedness in your harlotry with your lovers and abominable idols, and because you sacrificed the life-blood of your children to them,

37: I will now gather together all your lovers whom you tried to please, whether you loved them or loved them not; I will gather them against you from all sides and expose you naked for them to see.

38: I will inflict on you the sentence of adulteresses and murderesses; I will wreak fury and jealousy upon you.

39: I will hand you over to them to tear down your platform and demolish your dais; they shall strip you of your garments and take away your splendid ornaments, leaving you stark naked.

40: They shall lead an assembly against you to stone you and hack you with their swords.

41: They shall burn your apartments with fire and inflict punishments on you while many women look on. Thus I will put an end to your harlotry, and you shall never again give payment.

42: When I have wreaked my fury upon you I will cease to be jealous of you, I will be quiet and no longer vexed.

43: Because you did not remember what happened when you were a girl, but enraged me with all these things, therefore in return I am bringing down your conduct upon your head, says the Lord GOD. For did you not add lewdness to the rest of your abominable deeds?

44: See, everyone who is fond of proverbs will say of you, 'Like mother, like daughter.'

45: Yes, you are the true daughter of the mother who spurned her husband and children, and you are a true sister to those who spurned their husbands and children--your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite.

46: Your elder sister was Samaria with her daughters, living to the north of you; and your younger sister, living to the south of you, was Sodom with her daughters.

47: Yet not only in their ways did you walk, and act as abominably as they did; in a very short time you became more corrupt in all your ways than they.

48: As I live, says the Lord GOD, I swear that your sister Sodom, with her daughters, has not done as you and your daughters have done!

49: And look at the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were proud, sated with food, complacent in their prosperity, and they gave no help to the poor and needy.

50: Rather, they became haughty and committed abominable crimes in my presence; then, as you have seen, I removed them.

51: Samaria did not commit half your sins! You have done more abominable things than they, and have even made your sisters appear just, with all the abominable deeds you have done.

52: You, then, bear your shame; you are an argument in favor of your sisters! In view of your sinful deeds, more abominable than theirs, they appear just in comparison with you. Blush for shame, and bear the shame of having made your sisters appear just.

53: I will restore their fortunes, the fortune of Sodom and her daughters and of Samaria and her daughters (and I will restore your fortune along with them),

54: that you may bear your shame and be disgraced for all the comfort you brought them.

And there, hidden in religious and sexist language, is an early mythic version of cycle theory. If one stays strong and pure, and honors the values proposed by religion, God will protect and cherish you. If one falls from purity, say, because one has had relative good times for several generations, the Middle East is a harsh place. It is God's place to purge, humiliate and destroy. Fourth Turnings will come to in part to restore the old covenant, but often enough there would be a new covenant. What God demanded after any crisis would not necessarily be the same as he demanded before.

As it is human nature to fall short of the sort of purity religious fanatics can create, the Jews constantly fell short of expectations. As Jerusalem was a decent place to put a civilization, surrounded by better places to put civilizations, decent semblance of God's wrath marched through at regular intervals.

The result was one of the great world religions. Two heirs of that legacy are struggling even today. Al Qaida sees their culture as fallen from the true path of Gods Will. In seeking to personify His Wrath and restore His Values... Well... Their actions might not be viewed as ideal by others. Christianists also see it as right and proper to punish the metaphorical harlot, to take God's place, to inflict indignity, humiliation, pain and death upon those who do not meet certain ideals.

Anyway, getting back to the story of Ezekiel 16, if God had protected and cherished the child Jerusalem before she had developed breasts, before she was sexy and attractive, instead of letting her become dysfunctional growing up without a family making a living doing whatever was necessary, perhaps she would have turned out different. God had much to learn from his not yet born son.

Though I'm not sure that justified her building platforms on street corners, lifting her skirts, displaying her assets to potential customers... Hey, when you give her "bracelets on your arms, a necklace about your neck, a ring in your nose, pendants in your ears, and a glorious diadem upon your head," a lover just has to expect exclusivity, right? Who knew God was into body piercing?

Anyway, I have found myself unable to worship that God. I would step away from justifications for humiliation, pain, suffering and death. There ought to be other paths.

Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86

If one encountered a typical saudi cleric the clerics first reaction would be to advocate your death.

Wow! How did you escape all the homicidal muslim clerics you must have met in the course of gaining such an understanding of their nature? You must be able to run really fast. Or maybe you just have really powerful kung fu?

You should read some indian sites, they known over many centuries what to expect from the "Religion of Peace".

Oh yeah, those peaceful Hindus and their (still-worshipped) god of destruction. There's a good reference source for information on comparative religions...

Originally Posted by catfishncod

I can see it now...

...on my grandmother's bookshelf.

Right idea, wrong application, I think. (Though still a good idea, for Boomers and above.) Here are some random ideas that might be a little closer to the Millenial Experience...

* The Norton Anthology of the Great Books
* Cliff's Notes on: The 200 Greatest Books in History
* lj-feed: great_books
* Great Books @ youtube.com
* Great Books For Dummies
* Oprah's Great Books Club
* Great Books CurrentTV
* What's So Great About These Books, Anyway? (webcomic, updated Mondays and Thursdays)

... some of them might even be doable...

One more

* Great Books as Graphic Novels

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Yep. While I respect the Millennials, breaking things down into sound byte sized potions and a much faster pace might be the essence of where they are at. [Lucas] said one of the things he was trying to do was find out how much information one can feed the audience without losing them.... Then you go back to classic movies, perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird. Great acting. Great ideas. Sllloooowwww by modern standards. They would spend a couple of hours dancing around an issue. I mean, why watch MGM musicals when you can just do That's Entertainment?

Well, in your next message you quoted a great example of what I'm thinking of: Blogging the Bible. It's keeping me engaged in Bible-reading (I got stuck at Jeremiah on my last try -- what a jerk) and feeding me points I'd never noticed before. Most of all, it comes on a semi-regular basis, keeping me engaged day to day and week to week. In an ADHD world, this feature is essential.

Because of the Web, we can have our sound byte cake and eat it too. Just hyperlink to the Gutenberg Project text and/or Amazon's listing of published editions. Anyone intrigued enough to spend more time can spend it on the slow version; the rest get the Msg o/Day and keep on truckin'. I read faster than most people, and I still don't have time to plow through the full text of, say, de Tocqueville, or Adam Smith. I wish I did, but that's neither here nor there.

Have you ever seen the James Burke series, Connections? He bounces through history, forward and back, all around the world, showing how cause and effect are inter-related in history, in science, in society. Combine that with another old 4T/1T idea, You Are There, where Walter Cronkite reports from the front lines of history. Actually, come to think of it, Uncle Walter's still doing that, in another form. Liberty's Kids on PBS is a dramatization of the American Revolution, with Uncle Walter as the voice of Dr. Franklin. The main characters are three teens (one each American, British, and French) observing the Revolution as stringers for the Pennsylvania Gazette.

And believe it or not, the original premise of Doctor Who was an educational show of just this type. The Doctor and his companions were to bounce between points in history (teaching, well, history) and points in the future (to teach science). Then somebody decided to recast the Nazis (you can't do that on television... at least not in the 2T) as Daleks... and the world was never the same...

Your suggested episode fits well, I think, into such a paradigm. I bet it can be done. With CGI, some Hollywood voice talent, and good planning... it could really kick the llama's ass. Then tie in the actual Great Books series as an adjunct purchase. "If you like exploring the ideas of Socrates and Marx, why not try The Condensed Great Books, vol. 3: Political Greats? Or collect the whole series, $29.99 + shipping and handling each, buy all you want, cancel anytime..."

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Maybe someone should do computer animated Great Books exerts. Maybe start with the Death of Socrates, with the great man who taught loyalty to the state, how much individuals owe the state, and perhaps respecting great institutions. Maybe hint at the phalanx culture of the time, come home with your shield or on it, the notion that the State is greater than individuals. Then, maybe Thomas Jefferson could crash onto the set. Powers of government limited by individual rights. Freedom of speech. Power of the state derived from the consent of the governed. Not agreeing with a word you say, but defending to the death the right to say it...

That's Voltaire poking his head in the door. "Candygram!"

The trick is to make it engaging and not just something that a social sciences teacher would play in class to avoid lecturing. Draw 'em in. You can lead a man to water but you can't make them think... but get them discussing it. I mean, the death penalty is one thing, but who actually volunteers to help self-administer it? Who goes willingly, because the law is important?

Well, what about Tookie Williams?

Then cut to a discussion between Karl Marx and Andrew Carnegie. Start out with Carnegie's assertion that he was correct in paying nearly zilch wages to his workers, as Carnegie would use the money to build libraries, while the workers would just waste the money on gambling and beer.

Don't forget a very important part of Carnegie's justification: those libraries would let anyone do what he did. Sure, the rich oppressed the poor, but anyone could get rich, and in Carnegie's ideal America, there would be no inheritance as well. Equal opportunity. No aristocracies. Anyone can be an oppressive capitalist baron!

Cue Henry Ford...

Have Marx get real sincere and real accurate with the suffering caused by capitalist excess, and predicting ever more severe recessions and depressions unless the workers overthrew the oppressors. Carnegie might quote Supreme Court rulings on the sanctity of the contract, on how the government could not interfere in the economy. Maybe Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. could step in, paraphrase his famous dissents, and say the Constitution does not say anything about contracts being sacred, that the arguments for laissez faire have no constitutional basis. We could end with Marx's predictions of how perfect a worker's paradise would be.

And Ford telling him he's an idiot. Call in someone from the AFL-CIO, screaming at Ford for a few seconds, then shaking hands on a deal. Lech Walesa on line one... Dr. Marx, it's for you...

The desired lesson behind the lesson, aside from presenting a history of values to complement the history of names and dates, would be to push a notion that great men can be great, ahead of their time, possess extraordinary passion and power, and be seen as dead wrong a century or so downstream. Values are not permanent.

History has too often been presented as coordinates: names, faces, dates, and places. Those are important, but the human stories imbedded in that four-dimensional grid are what make history. Sometime in the 2T we had a crisis of confidence in which memes we should push. This re-assessment has been useful, I think, but now, in the 4T, it's time to drop some arches in keystones again. Time to craft a neo-Western meme complex to push -- more inclusive than the old one (of course!) but also opposing the tyrannies that REALLY need opposing.

But values altering Truths are hard to teach. Doing so in sound byte size packages would require... a change in approach.

Then we'd better get started.