War of the Professors

First it was Fukuyama.

Francis Fukuyama, an American philosopher of Japanese descent, was born in Chicago in 1952. A professor at Stanford University, he’s still alive today and continues to make a living at Stanford.

In 1992, he published the book “The End of History and the Last Man,” in which he hastened to proclaim the victory of Western democracy over communism and announced the imminent spread of liberal democracy around the world.

Furthermore, Fukuyama called liberal democracy the endpoint of man’s socio-cultural evolution, just like Soviet propagandists portrayed communist society as the endpoint of mankind’s development in their day.

Since “The End of History” was written and published in the midst of the fall of the Soviet Union and the general euphoria about it in the West (you remember how back then the West arrogated to itself the victory over the USSR in the Cold War), the Stanford professor’s book was a resounding success.

But before long the jig was up for Fukuyama. Already the next year, in the summer of 1993, an article titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in the elite, highbrow journal Foreign Affairs. It was written by Professor Samuel Huntington, a former expert on the popular uprisings in Vietnam in President Johnson’s administration and the director of Harvard University’s Institute for Strategic Studies. The whole world began talking about the article.

Huntington identified eight cultures/civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly (the professor wasn’t sure) African. Each of these civilizations represents a system of values symbolized by religion, which Huntington said, “…is central, perhaps the central force that mobilizes and motivates people.”

The fundamental division, says Fukuyama, takes place between the West and the Rest. The two most threatening civilizations are those of Islam and Confucianism (oil and Chinese exports). If these two civilizations ever were to unite, they would constitute a danger to the very existence of Western civilization. Thus, the West (and specifically the United States) should be prepared to fight against the threats from these civilizations.

In 1996, “The Clash of Civilizations?” came out as a separate book, and due to Osama bin Laden’s well-known actions, became a worldwide best-seller. In the book, Huntington was already speaking about the inevitability of a clash between Islam and Western countries and that this clash would resemble the Soviet-U.S. Cold War.

However, Sept. 11, 2001 did not resemble the Cold War and did not portend such in the future.

Professor Huntington passed away peacefully in 2008 at the age of 81 in Massachusetts, in a town with the biblical name, Martha’s Vineyard. Prophets know how to leave at just the right time: before the fulfillment of their prophecies. And he left us to live on, together with Islam.

Knowing full-well the prophecies of Huntington, a veteran expert on popular uprisings, the United States nevertheless couldn’t contain itself in recent decades from using radical Islam for its own purposes.

Having been burned once by Osama bin Laden, it didn’t stop its self-destructive actions in creating radical Islamic Frankensteins as its proxies.

The U.S. began creating radical Islamist monsters everywhere it could. Together with France, Italy, and the whole tight-knit EU team, it created them in Libya, summoning there from all over the world a tumultuous, warring camp of radical Islamists. Now, it’s managed to create the monster of the Islamic State, the Caliphate, as the Caliphate escaped from under its supervision and is now raising hell, chopping and cutting off the hated Crusaders’ heads and exploding in exuberant joy in European cities.

Islam really does have a major score to settle with the West. The Crusades were bloody atrocities.

Yet, Islam is no choirboy, either. Militant Islam, having conquered Arabia, Iran and Central Asia, then crossing North Africa to the Iberian (we call it the Pyrenean) Peninsula, captured Spain and came to France, but was stopped by the Franks at the Battle of Poitiers in 732.

Islam waged continuous wars against the Byzantine Empire, stood many times at the gates of Constantinople, and finally the Seljuk Turks conquered it in 1453. So those who live in glass houses…

At the very beginning of 2015, the popular French writer Michel Houellebecq released a book in Paris titled “Soumission” – “Submission.” It’s a novel, a dispassionate dystopia. In 2021, Mohammed Ben Abbes, a candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood party, comes to power in France by democratic vote.

Civil war doesn’t break out. Customs merely change gradually: skirts disappear and women begin wearing baggy trousers; make-up disappears; to the delight of French men, polygamy gradually finds acceptance; churches disappear and mosques are erected; professors, including the main character of Houellebecq’s novel, a professor at the Sorbonne, are well paid with Saudi money. In the final pages of the novel, the professor accepts Islam.

The year 2021 is just around the corner. And in the meantime, they’re killing Paris.