On Gaza
Daniel Larison (4 January), here.
Daniel Larison (4 January), here.
Daniel Larison (5 January), here.
Daniel Larison (5 January), here.
Daniel Larison (6 January), here.
Mustafa Akyol (3 January), here.
On the Late, Great Samuel Huntington
Francis Fukuyama (29 December), here.
Rod Dreher (4 January), here.
On the End of the (Financial) World
Michael Lewis, here.
3 comments:
Thanks very much for the link to the Fukuyama piece, which I'd like to read more closely when I have more time -- I'm off to an Old Calendar Christmas celebration soon.
My main interest in Huntington has been in his "clash of civilizations" thesis. I've often seen sneering references to it from people who clearly seem to think he was wrong, but most of them never say why, or if they hint at it, the hints seem to indicate that they've not read Huntington's book and simply object to the term.
I recently blogged on how recent events tend to confirm his thesis -- Notes from underground: Congo church massacre: witnesses -- and would be interested in your take on that.
Your observations are right on target. Many in the Left dismissed Huntington without ever really engaging his thesis. His contention that conflicts among nations arise from age-old cultural and civilization factors, rather than ideologies, flies in the face of their view of the perfectibility of man, and other standard liberal ideologies. The Right was equally ill-versed in Huntington's thesis. They (or at least the neocons who captured the Right) twisted the label into a "Clash of Civilization," and used it as justification and cover for preemptive strikes, "spreading of democracy" and nation-building.
I have, of course, been following the story of the church massacres in the Congo. But I really do not know anything about the LRA. What can you tell me about this organization.
Alice Auma, a young woman from Acholiland in northern Uganda, became possessed by the spirit Lakwena shortly after her conversion to Catholicism in the mid-1980s. This gave her power to heal and find witches. The spirit eventually instructed her to lead her followers in a war against the National Resistance Movement shortly after its successful guerrilla struggle ended in 1986.
Under the name of the Lord's Resistance Army, remnants of Lakwena's movements have continued to cause security problems in the North (Kassimir in Spear & Kimambo 1999:250). Under the leadership of Joseph Kony, a relative of the founder the movement turned into a militia, and recruited child soldiers,
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