A cultural identity crisis

Does the west have a cultural identity crisis? Are we dying on the vine? A bizzare story hit the press today about Hugo Chavez's attendance at an 'unofficial summit' held in Austria, where he said the following:

Chavez said in Vienna yesterday that the 'final hours of the North American empire have arrived ... Now we have to say to the empire: "We're not afraid of you. You're a paper tiger."'

By the way, Blair refused a state visit, but not surprisingly London Mayor Ken Livingstone rolled out the "red" carpet for el Hugo on his way back to Venezuela.

This would-be dictator is not ignorant. He shares an inate ability with other politicians of being able to read the tea leaves. His arrogant message deep in the heart of Old Europe is clear evidence the people there have lost their spine. Chavez was probably trying to rile up the disaffected immigrant masses to further destabilize the continent, and he was doing it right in their faces.

We've used that tactic in Iraq to pit the Sunnis against the Ba'athists--divide and conquer. If Chavez can help to further the divide between the European countries chalk one up for their side. And make no mistake, he's on 'their' side. While there he warned against attacking Iran and threatened repurcussions from his country if we do. He should have been frog-marched out the front door for those comments.

But the Euros have other problems. Recently Vladimir Putin was forced into making a plea to the women of Russia--make more babies, please:

Describing the issue as contemporary Russia's most acute problem, he told Russian couples he would more than double to 1,500 roubles ($55.39) monthly payouts to families for the first baby and then double that to 3,000 roubles for a second child.

It's all about TFR (total fertitily rate) which needs to stay a little over 2 to maintain a population. Russia is running about one and a quarter while also battling a low life expectancy, especially for males. What's it mean? Let's go to the scoreboard--Russia is losing 700,000 comrades per year, and could lose a staggering 40 million from their population rolls by the middle of the century if the current trend continues.

The European continent faces similar issues. Their initial response was to encourage immigration, which would help fill the population gap but more importantly help fund their vast social safety net. The results so far have been uncertain. Old Europe is less a melting pot than America, and as we've seen via the cartoon riots, Paris riots, and terrorist attacks the assimilation leaves a lot to be desired. Despite that, we're told most Europeans despise Bush's handling of the WoT.

We could even bring Dan Brown into this debate. The goal of the DaVinci Code, other than to make money, seems to be to undermine most of European history along with making Christianity appear based on a lie. Advertently or inadvertently, if successful that helps the axis.

To be fair, the jury is still out on whether the movie will have much impact at all. It's pretty ridiculous to assume Leonardo DaVinci, who lived centuries after Christ, would have any better insight into what happened than someone today. Maybe he was a dissafected artist tired of the rigors of the church and was only exacting some clever revenge.

But it goes towards cracking another brick in the culture wall. All things being equal, a faith-based society, even if the faith is wrongheaded, will usually win against a faith-less society since armies tend to fight harder when they have something to fight for. An asterisk may appear if all things aren't equal, in other words, if the faith-less society has better weaponry and shows the will to use it. But guns alone won't do it.

In my mind the WoT remains a war of good versus evil, not based on individual persons
but of ideologies. Hardcore Wahhabism/Salafism is not congruent with "good" when compared to any democratic society built on individual human rights. We're not hammering that point hard enough, while others are hammering their totalitarian points on a daily basis.

But it's hard to hammer anything when western society doesn't have a clue about what our shared values are, or whether we even have any. Or whether that's a good thing or bad thing.