a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Tuesday, June 03, 2003 Arabization of AmericaRichard Rodriguez had a good thing on the NewsHour yesterday about war as an intimate act. He talked about Spain, the New World, and conquered races mingling with their conquerers. He predicted that the Iraq war and occupation might mark the beginning of a long, slow Arabization of the United States. I was thinking the same thing last week in a totally different context. Roman emperors threw early Christians to the lions. After a few hundred years, Rome turned Christian. But which Christian "fathers" survived those centuries of persecution? Not the sane ones, not the ones who wrote the Gnostic gospels and thought of Christ as a metaphor. It was the fundamentalists, the martyrs who touted Christ's literal death and resurrection to glorify getting torn to shreds. (Some of them were terrorists. Eric Rudolph is one of their shriveled descendants.)So if America becomes the imperial power trying to keep Islam in check, then the most fanatic Muslims might become known as fathers and heroes to whatever brand of Islam survives until, say, 2350. Pure speculation, and maybe wrong, since Islam is already organized in a way the early Christians weren't. And the U.S. is a kinder behemoth than Rome. But Rodriguez is right: History has a way of turning on its poles, and if the future is defined for too long by radical Islam vs. American liberalism, is an Islamic United States completely out of the question? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:32 PM | |
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