Sunday, March 3, 2019

JUST HOW DID AMERICANS GROW TO SEE THE WORLD

History of our place is rich and you can start there. I did when I was just a little older than when my opinions started to form shape and by that, come to be what I perceive as reality based on a written history that I've been exposed to. It doesn't sound like much but it was.

My parents took me out of school after 2nd grade in Annandale and made me study very very hard all summer, endless summer, so I could be accepted at a school where, instead of learning about dragons, we learned Greek classical myth and history, and Latin, and French. That ate my 3rd and 4th grades. By the end of that I could forge a parent signature in under 12 seconds in the bathroom, at twilight.

More importantly though was our accommodations. They were, as usual, quite nice. My parents gave me 100% of the attic to live in and his bookshelves were at the top of the stairs to their room and the top of the stairs to my room. I was 10. I read them all. Lee's Lieutenants to Greek Myth I read everything and that included one of the few paperbacks, a book by Leon Uris. I read that a couple of times back then, under the covers on an old army spring bed with an old army sprung lamp. It was Exodus. I might have reread it in college on my own between volumes of history. No, that wasn't my major but I liked reading history.

That one book, read at just that age, shaped forever my view on the Middle East that gives the rest of the world conniptions. It helps that I spent most of a decade serving there but that's incidental.

At the age of 10 my fully formed thought for the rest of my life was based on that one book.

I do know exactly what the shabab trained little girls and boys learn and the little PLO and Hamas boys and girls learn at that age and I'm here to tell you, it's just about unshakable. The paths that knowledge delivered then, at that age, carves paths into the brain and memory that cannot be revoked.

Throughout the islamic world the saudis and emirates and the rest have been funding whole schools where the only thing taught is hate.

Oddly enough, nobody talks about it very much.

They're doing it right now right here in the United States and they've been doing it for generations in Western Europe, NATO, Turkey and the rest of the world such as Africa where they do things unimaginable to the West almost every single day but the West doesn't pay attention because Africa is huge and is mostly run by the Nazgul.

3 comments:

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

Hate is a powerful, appealing emotion, because it is so pure. It has the side benefit of allowing you to feel superior to those that you hate. That is undoubtedly part of it's attraction to the Left, and to Islam, as both of them must feel superior to their enemies. The Left and Islam have well deserved feelings of inadequacy.

HMS Defiant said...

I don't know. Reading Exodus didn't leave me filled with hate. Uris did a good job with that book to explain the Aliyah and what it meant. I put him in the same categrory as Michner who could write about a thing and bring it to immediate life for the reader but it never shaped my opinions of things the way Exodus did and Exodus didn't fill me with hate. Quite the opposite.

I worked for years in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE. 100% of the people that I met and worked with year after year were damned nice people. There is an error in the islamic code that is spreading like wildfire. Srsly, the men I worked with over there were wonderful and they all spoke English, went to our schools and yet something happened that I cannot explain.
I ran military convoys the length of Saudi Arabia from the causeway in Bahrain up to Kuwait and I never met anybody who was not happy to see us in our uniforms and with our obviously military 5 ton trucks.

OTOH, I see the sheer hatred that some over there have for not us, but for the West and it seems to be spreading across the arab world. I spent a month in Karachi and it was pleasant. I wouldn't go there now. I woudln't go to the UAE, Qatar or Oman and certainly not to any part of Egypt or the rest of north Africa.

Mostly, I guess, because in this day and age unlike the old days of the 19th century, travelers are disarmed and left defenseless to the mad ones.

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

The mad once are a problem, no matter what religion, or philosophy.