What does civilization really mean?
DK:
"The question of how the United States and the other nations of the world should respond is, in my opinion, a very challenging one to which there is no simple answer. It is easy enough to argue that ISIS represents a great evil and thus must be destroyed. Some are already willing to argue that to destroy its leadership, we should even ignore the human rights of the population of Raqqa and other ISIS strongholds, just as we did the populations of German and Japanese cities during the Second World War. Even President Obama has identified ISIS as a threat to world civilization that must be "degraded and defeated"--but he insists that the United States can play only an auxiliary role in that process, and his own military steps have been relatively cautious. The recapture of Ramadi by Iraqi government-supported forces, assisted by American air power, suggests things are moving in the right direction--but very slowly.
"ISIS does undoubtedly represent a threat to civilized values as serious in character--if not in scale--to those posed by Germany and Japan in the Second World War, or by Communism under Stalin and Mao. Two of those four regimes were destroyed by allied coalitions; the other two survived for decades and collapsed, or changed, mostly because of internal pressures. Other at least equally serious threats to western civilization in earlier periods include the Mongol and Ottoman Empires. History does not, in short, support the idea that we must attempt to destroy certain regimes simply because of their evil nature.--or that we can do so. We need a broader kind of test for action."
"...The real challenge for the governments of the West is in many ways an intellectual one: to accept that their values have not, and will not, prevail in large parts of the world for some time to come....." DK
I will let you guess what he thinks the term civilization means.
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