Yohanes Saputra’s Reviews > The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat > Status Update

Penetrating. Got to know a lot.

Family structure as a loyalty, culture of repudiation, feminism, Marxism, the postmodernists, the dwindling of the Enlightenment vision and, as a consequence of that downdling, the emergence of a society on which relativistic on matters of truth and dethrones reason for the sake of rejecting "Western values". Very, very enlightening. This book is already a masterpiece.

National identity is, with secular law and territorial jurisdiction, what makes the modern state as we now know. There is an organic evolution happening, and this national identity is a some kind of unity that is needed: to change course to the political, there has to be a precedence that unifies the various peoples. That is, there has to be a pre-political loyalty positioned before secularization.

National identity is, with secular law and territorial jurisdiction, what makes the modern state as we now know. There is an organic evolution happening, and this national identity is a some kind of unity that is needed: to change course to the political, there has to be a precedence that unifies the various peoples. That is, there has to be a pre-political loyalty positioned before secularization.

The Christian legacy is there in the political order. While secular law and territorial sovereignty are needed, the virtue of forgiveness is actually a contributing one. Why? This virtue cuts right to the problem of societies meeting each other, that of the problem of scapegoating. Scapegoating is an organic process, and this process is stopped when the victim anticipates the violence laid to him by this virtue.

The problem with the Arab states is the devoid ideology and pre-political loyalties that make other non-Arab countries united. A European state, emerging from the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is standing because of this very reason. While Arabian states needed one, like Arab nationalism, to unify the Arab-speaking peoples into one entity of a secular government. Syria and Egypt were an example of this.