"Si nos tomamos en serio la lucha contra el islamismo y el terrorismo, entonces también debe ser una lucha cultural. Las mezquitas salafistas deben ser prohibidas, sus comunidades han de disolverse y los predicadores deben ser expulsados, tan pronto como sea posible. Los que predican la violencia no gozan de la protección de la libertad religiosa". Sigmar Gabriel, vicepresidente del gobierno alemán y líder del Partido Socialdemócrata (SPD)
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They are said to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society.
But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that figures such as Plato, Descartes and Immanuel Kant should be largely dropped from the curriculum because they are white.
The student union at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) insists that when studying philosophy “the majority of philosophers on our courses” should be from Africa and Asia.
The union said it is part of wider campaign to “decolonise” the university, as it seeks to “address the structural and epistemological legacy of colonialism”.
It comes after education leaders warned that universities will be forced to pander to the demands of “snowflake” students, however unreasonable they might be.
Under proposed reforms to higher education, the Government wants to place student satisfaction at the heart of a new ranking system, but critics fear it could undermine academic integrity.
Sir Roger Scruton, the philosopher, said the demands suggest “ignorance”. “You can't rule out a whole area of intellectual endeavour without having investigated it and clearly they haven't investigated what they mean by white philosophy,” he told The Mail on Sunday.
“If they think there is a colonial context from which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason arose, I would like to hear it.'
Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, added: “There is a real danger political correctness is getting out of control. We need to understand the world as it was and not to rewrite history as some might like it to have been.”
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Desde el 20 de diciembre, el día que José María Aznar renunció a la presidencia de honor del PP, casi 11.000 personas han firmado en Change.org una petición para pedirle públicamente que lidere un nuevo partido político al margen del PP. Sin embargo, el porcentaje de ciudadanos que votaría al expresidente del Gobierno si fundase un nuevo partido sería muchísimo mayor. Según el macrosondeo EL ESPAÑOL / SocioMétrica, hasta un 15% de votantes (3,9 millones) estaría dispuesto a depositar de nuevo su confianza en otra formación política que abanderara el exjefe del Ejecutivo. En total, podría alcanzar una representación parlamentaria de 51 escaños.
La nueva formación política encabezada por Aznar recibiría el mayor trasvase de votos del Partido Popular, el partido que él mismo presidió durante catorce años: uno de cada cinco votantes que el 26-J apostó por Mariano Rajoy hoy lo haría por José María Aznar. Además, de los 10,4 millones de españoles que en los últimos comicios se abstuvieron, el 16,1% (1.680.189 votos) estaría dispuesto a apoyarle. Solo con estas dos variables, un partido encabezado por el expresidente del Gobierno ya se aseguraría tres millones de votos, lo que se traduciría en una representación parlamentaria de 40 escaños, ocho más de lo que hoy tiene Ciudadanos.
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The critical importance of the Greater Caribbean to the Mississippi River system made it necessary for America to strategically dominate what might be called the American Mediterranean — for such is the geopolitical centrality of the Greater Caribbean to the entire Western Hemisphere. This process of domination began roughly with the Monroe Doctrine and was completed with the building of the Panama Canal. Having become the dominant hemispheric power, the United States was then in a position to help determine the balance of power in the other hemisphere — and that is what the history of the 20th century was all about. Fighting two world wars and the Cold War was about not letting any power or alliance of powers dominate the Old World to the extent that the United States dominated the New World.
But before controlling the Caribbean, Americans first had to settle a continent. The barrier to that was the Great Plains, or the Great American Desert, as it was called in the 19th century. For the well-watered Midwest with its rich farmland was but an extension of the East. Yet the Great American Desert was dry, achingly flat in large measure and water-starved compared with the Midwest. While the riverine eastern half of the continent was friendly to individualism, the western half required communalism, to properly apportion scarce water resources. Indeed, whereas Iowa is basically 100 percent arable, Utah with its cindery bleakness is only 3 percent arable. The Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain West constituted the real discontinuities in American history, since they fundamentally altered Anglo-Saxon culture and created a distinctly American one.
This American culture was only in small measure that of the cowboy tradition, with its lonesome risk-taking. In much larger measure it was about supreme caution, the respecting of limits, and thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy: that was the only psychology and strategy able to deal with a stupefyingly hostile and parched landscape. The very settlement of the American West taught pioneers, despite all their conquests, that they could not always have their way in the world. And that is precisely the message advanced by the three greatest interpreters of westward expansion: Walter Prescott Webb, Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner, all writing their most significant works in the middle decades of the 20th century, when the settlement of the West was much closer in time than it is now.
Another thing: The United States required the resources of an entire continent to defeat German and Japanese fascism, and later Soviet Communism. Without Manifest Destiny, there could have been no victory in World War II. But because settling that continent involved slavery and genocide against the indigenous inhabitants, American history is morally unresolvable. Thus, the only way to ultimately overcome our sins is to do good in the world. But doing good must be tempered by always thinking about what can go wrong in the process. These are all, deep down, the lessons of the interaction between Americans and their landscape.
ROBERT D. KAPLAN | Th New York Times
