I hesitate to enter an already flooded marketplace with yet another take on the unfolding debacle in Afghanistan. But I'm exceedingly concerned that amid…
- all the appropriate denunciations over how the Biden administration has bungled this withdraw,
- all the legitimate criticism over President Biden's disappearance into the ether while his country and its veterans have serious questions,
- all the perplexed voices reasonably wondering what we have been doing at least the last decade given that the "army" we have supplied and trained folded like a wet noodle,
- all the political bickering over who is most to blame for the global humiliation of having horse-riding militia overrun our embassy, take our drones, and stockpile billions of American taxpayer dollars-worth of arms and equipment,
…that amid all that, a fundamental and exceedingly apparent reality will be missed. In the long run, for our civilization at least, it may be the most important lesson of the moment. For the last several decades, basking in the glory and prosperity afforded them by the brilliance of Western civilization and all its enlightened ideas and human rights advances, the progressive left has been waging an all-out war on those very bedrock principles.
Multiculturalists and woke theorists have concocted stupid notions of "cultural appropriation" and shamed as racist or xenophobic those who would suggest some civilizations are more advanced than others, because some civilizational ideas are better than others.
Others, from critical race theorists to LGBT activists to third-wave feminists, have literally invented "oppression" in order to have a cause to raise money off of, all while chipping away at the superior Western ideas of individual liberty, religious freedom, scientific method, diversity of thought, equality, and property rights.
In a moment like this, where the entire world has a front-row seat to watching a truly theocratic fascism ascendant in brutal fashion, the utter stupidity of the left's culture war against Western civilization is exposed.
Gay people are in danger under backwards, Islamic theocracies like the one taking over Afghanistan. They are not in danger in Western countries like America where they marry one another and adopt children, where the rainbow illuminates the White House, where their flags fly above every major corporate headquarters and on every company's Twitter avatar, and any public figure who doesn't affirm and celebrate their agenda is unceremoniously canned or canceled.
Women are discriminated against in places where things like the Handmaid's Tale aren't imaginary, hyperbolic, dystopian novels used to whip wealthy and successful women into believing they are just moments away from involuntary servitude.
Across the ocean right now, the introduction of Western civilization led to this:
And now the withdrawal of that Western influence means many of those same women will be raped, enslaved, and erased from public life. Literally:
Even Bari Weiss, a woman who was overtly discriminated against and run out of a job at the New York Times because she dared to think differently than the leftist Twitterverse, understands there is a galactic difference between what she suffered and what truly oppressed women face in cultures unenlightened by Western ideas.
So while we're all forming and sharing our opinions on what's unfolding in Afghanistan, let's also rediscover just how blessed we are to live the Western world, and how foolish we are when we pretend otherwise.
