Civilization seen by Col. Landis

Andrew Targowski

Col. Landis criticizes my 750 word long entry to the 2014 ISCSC Newsletter for the lack of broader support of my statements.  It is not a scientific paper, just a very short sketch on a very broad topic. More “substance” on that topic is in my book, The Limits of Civilizations (144 pages).  This sketch is my opinion, since the subject matter is based on predicting the future of civilization which is always based on many “ifs.”
The Polemists insist that other intelligence did not visit our Planet for the same reason our SETI system cannot cross the light speed barrier. Einstein said it is impossible, but as Jennifer Ouellette explains some scientists are still trying to break the cosmic speed limit – even if it means bending the laws of physics. Same Einstein asked what is more in God’s basket besides the four laws of physics?  It means that he was wondering whether, perhaps this barrier is only for us leaving on Earth?
Col. Landis asks me why I did not explain what does it mean “survival of the fittest.” I did not do it since our Members know it. Perhaps millions of people know that it is the essence of Darwin’s theory which is the base in all scientific disciplines and common sense disputes.
The Colonel does not like my line “In the 21st century, the progress of the civilized man reached its climax, as illustrated by the …large scale use of the internet.”  He claims that this is totally unsubstantiated. In my view the Internet leads to the strong globalization, decline of Western civilization due to minimalization of the middle class (through outsourcing), replacing Christian values by business values, growth of global stateless corporations, unsustainable growth of production by cheap labor and mass volume of resources, glory of super-consumerism, and population growth, ignition of the ecological bomb, depletion of strategic resources, vulgarization of culture, and so forth.
“Why the use of mobile phones leads to the contraction of the human brain?” Smiles the Colonel.  Because, users of those phones use not full words but short symbols and acronyms, leaving memorization to electronics. This is the reversal of the development of the human brain, which took place about 50,000 years ago when we began to use a developed language constantly growing in the number of words, which led to the development of our vast vocabulary and our brain as well in terms of capacity as in complexity of meanings and their syntax and  semantic relations. The declining use of F2F communication and short acronyms will eventually shrink the human brain. Wait a few centuries for the first statistics. I do not need to produce statistics in 750 word long sketch for a Newsletter. You may find more in my recent book, Virtual Civilization in the 21st Century.
Dear Col. Landis, you are right, Western civilization used to westernize the world. However, in the 21st century, such civilizations as Islamic, Buddhist, Chinese, even Eastern (Russia) want to modernize by not being westernized. Eventually Western civilization will be swallowed by Global civilization. The Colonel is right that Western civilization created Global civilization but now the former is eaten by the later. According to the rule that “a revolution eats its children.” Please read my book Global Civilization in the 21st Century.
Dear Col. Landis, I did not say that 100% of politicians are corrupted. I am not so stupid.
Thank you Col. Landis for providing me so many “fighting arguments” that I could use my “cannons.”
With respect
Andrew Targowski

Comment on Andrew Targowski's Winter 2014 ISCSC newsletter article "State of Civilization Where Are We Heading"

Benjamin L. Landis

I am very much disappointed in the article by Doctor Targowski in the Winter 2014 edition of the ISCSC.  Entitled “State of Civilization Where Are We Heading” it is ideological, not pedagogic; it is opinionated, not objective; it is superficial, not substantive.  Essentially it is the Gospel as declared by Doctor Targowski without any basis in history or fact.  And it is almost totally erroneous.
He begins by declaring “…Apparently man is unique universe-wise, too, or how do we explain that for 4.5 bln years no other “human” visited the earth or no signals betraying one have been recorded by the earth-based SETI system.”  This is nonsense.  The reason no other being has visited Earth is probably the same reason no member of our planet has visited any part of the universe outside our solar system.  We have not discovered how to exceed the speed of light.  We should not blame other societies for the same failing.  Years ago I remember Dr. Carl Sagan saying that there was a strong probability that other living species existed beyond our solar system.  Doctor Targowski’s reliance on the negative results achieved by SETI needs to be clarified.  Does SETI have the necessary equipment to probe the vastness of the universe and to detect living beings?  Has SETI attempted to do so?  If yes, has it covered the entire universe?
Next, he declares that the human species has evolved and endured thanks to the survival of the fittest.  Then, he immediately thereafter writes, maybe it was “…thanks to the skill of collective social life…”  And then again he continues by writing that “…another factor…was the advantageous shape of the hand…”  Or…  In fact, all these concepts are one.  They simply represent different phases or aspects of the evolution of the human species.  Furthermore, the use of the term “survival of the fittest” should have been clarified.  It does not mean in evolutionary theory the survival of the biggest and strongest and healthiest.  It means the survival of those organisms or animals which can best adapt to environmental changes.
The next paragraph that begins “…Further development of man was about the development of civilization…” is filled with inaccuracies.  Unfortunately, I cannot cite them in detail because of the limitation (500 to 1,000 words) on a blog post.
He begins the next paragraph by writing, “In the 21st century, the progress of the civilized man reached its climax, as illustrated by the …large scale use of the internet.”  This is totally unsubstantiated.  How can he know that civilized man has reached a climax?  Believing this, Doctor Targowski demonstrates that he does not understand what a civilization is.  He then writes, “The 21st century mass use of mobile phones…will soon lead to the contraction of the human brain…”  This is totally unsubstantiated.  Doctor Targowski needs to produce statistical or psychological proof that the use of mobile devices causes a deterioration of the brain.
In the next paragraph he states that the [internet] “...leads to the reduction of the world’s diversity as it promotes the expansion of the unified Global civilization…”  The use of the term “Global” is misleading.  Doctor Targowski needs to read Toynbee, who discerned the Westernization of the dying civilizations still in existence in the early 1950’s.  This “globalization” is a one way street.  Western Civilization is westernizing the rest of the world.  None of the other civilizations is impregnating Western Civilization.  But, in contradiction to what he shows on the chart accompanying the article, the world will not be completely westernized by the end of this century.  The transformation of a civilization, even a moribund one, takes centuries.
He then writes, “…the Global civilization…loosens [the] capability [of “social groups living in the same territory”] of self-defense and survival.”  This is a statement totally unsubstantiated by experience.  Doctor Targowski needs to explain how this could or would happen.
He writes, “This is expressed in the detachment of politicians from their service of the voters right after election and offering their services to various groups, scattered across the world, and represented by lobbyists.”  An unfortunate generalization.  He is saying that 100% of the politicians in all the countries of the world are corrupt.  He should know that this is not true.  There are bad politicians and there are good politicians.  There are honest politicians and there are dishonest politicians.  Someone once said or wrote (I think it was an Englishman) that a people has the politicians it deserves.  So, Doctor Targowski would do better to take after the people of the world and not their politicians.  Furthermore, “politicians” are a creation of Western Civilization’s democracies.  There existed civilizations before politicians and democracy.
Finally, he writes, “This is corroborated by the 21st century structural crisis of the states forming the Western Civilization, which in fact has been replaced by the Global Civilization.”  Again, wrong!  What does he mean by “structural crisis”?  Is he implying that 100% of the states of Western Civilization are undergoing this crisis?  He needs to substantiate that proclamation.  And lastly, he repeats his confusion:  Western Civilization has not been replaced by a Global Civilization.  On the contrary.  Western Civilization is creating a Global Civilization, but it will not come into full existence for several centuries.
My final word:  If you have time to waste, read the article, but don’t believe a word of it.  (I wish I could have been more detailed in my analysis of Doctor Targowski’s article, but I had word limitations imposed.)

frusaland@comcast.com

Comments on Dr. Farhat-Holzman’s ‘Clash of Civilizations offers Glimmers of Hope

Benjamin L. Landis

Dr. Farhat-Holzman’s blog post “ ‘Clash of Traditions’ offer glimmers of hope” [Note for the web site editor: The title should read ‘Clash of Traditions offers glimmers of hope’.] arouses a couple of comments.  First, more than forty years before Huntington, Dr. Arnold J. Toynbee in Volume VIII of his “A Study of History” treated the issue of clashes between civilizations.  Such clashes have existed almost since the beginnings of civilization.  They have traditionally featured warfare and conquest and the eventual assimilation of the conquered by the culture of the conquerors.  There have been, however, exceptions to this general rule.  The most prominent, to my less-than-complete knowledge, being the Islamic Arabs out of the Saudi Arabian desert assimilating the civilization of the more ancient Syriac Civilization and then transforming it into a unique Islamic Civilization.  Unless one wishes to argue that the Arabian Islamic conquerors were already a part of the Syriac Civilization.  But that’s a different blog post.
Huntington’s prediction “that we were headed for stormy times when the largest civilizations would not meet peacefully” (the words are from Dr Farhat-Holzman’s blog post) is fairly meaningless.  No civilizations, large or small, have ever met peacefully since the first civilizations.  Almost 20 years after Huntington’s book, what is the situation?
When the Second World War ended there were only five civilizations in existence: Western, Orthodox-Russian, Islamic, Far Eastern, and Hindu (I use Toynbee’s terminology.).  All these except the Western had suffered in the preceding centuries for two reasons: Colonialism and Westernization.  Starting in the fifteenth century the national states of Western Europe began to colonize the world.  By the end of the First World War North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand were a part of Western Civilization.  All of the Islamic world, except Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, all of Africa, except Liberia and Ethiopia, and most of Asia, except for Japan and China, were either colonies of Western nation states or dominated by them.  Western Civilization was easily recognizable as the most dynamic of the existing civilizations.  So, it can be said that the other globalizing force, i.e., westernization, began at the same time as colonization.  However, in most of the colonized countries the colonizers had little interest in westernizing the colonized populations.  It is certainly true, nevertheless, that some aspects of Western culture were passed on and adopted, but essentially the civilizations retained their particularities and personalities.
Today, colonialism is dead.  The major force acting on the relations between civilizations is now westernization.  Everywhere in the world one can see the various aspects of Western civilization penetrating the other civilizations.  One could argue that the Orthodox-Russian Civilization has become almost totally westernized.  On the other hand, the Islamic Civilization is fighting hard to resist westernization.  The United States government’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, its failure to achieve a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and its continuing military intervention in Islamic internal struggles have been major impediments to the adoption of Western culture in Islamic countries.  The Far Eastern and Hindu Civilizations are demonstrating a much more receptive attitude to their eventual westernization.
There will be eventually a global civilization, probably based on Western culture.  I agree with Dr. Targowski on this point.  However, neither he nor I nor Dr, Farhat-Holzman will live to see it.  And it will certainly not be achieved by the end of this century, as Dr. Targowski believes.  The signs of this westernization are everywhere: in the Arab Spring, in Saudi women driving cars, in South Koreans having plastic surgery to westernize their faces, in the Chinese government’s permitting capitalistic enterprises, in the expansion of English as the world’s second language, etc.  The list is long.  I am willing to give further examples if a reader requests, but I imagine that any reader can come up with his/her own.  But one must remember that complete acceptance of a foreign culture takes a very long time, centuries.
Dr. Farhat-Holzman writes that “…most scholars … upon the end of the Cold War, were convinced that the world had globalized; that the United States and its values had dominated all others, and that there was nothing really left to fight about. War was no longer really conceivable. We had every institution needed to regulate a peaceful, rational world order.”  I would like to know what scholars Dr. Farhat-Holzman is citing here.  They must have been living high in an aerie or deep in a cave.  I can’t cite any scholar who believed that.  The world had not then been globalized; it is not globalized today.  What does globalization mean?  Is the world globalized because I can fly from my home in the United States to Tokyo in less than a day?  Is the world globalized because I can have a telephone conversation with someone in Beijing?  Is the world globalized because most of the clothes I wear are made in China? I side with Dr. Targowski in his article in the 2014 Winter edition of the ISCSC Newsletter “The State of Civilization—Where are we heading?”.   Globalization is more than commerce; it is deeply cultural.
Furthermore, the United Nations had already demonstrated by its performance prior to the end of the Cold War that it was not capable of regulating “a peaceful, rational world order.”  What other organization or organizations is Dr. Farhat-Holzman thinking of?
I would appreciate any comments, pro or con or amplificatory, any reader would like to make on the points I make above.        

frusaland@comcast.com    

Public Trust and the Role of Law Enforcement

Lynn Rhodes
April 9, 2015

The responsibility of law enforcement to society is under close examination due to converging societal conditions that are not new. Recent shooting in the back of an unarmed black man in South Carolina and grand jury decisions not to indict officers involved in law enforcement related deaths of unarmed black men, amplify this convergence and resulting break-down of public trust.

Enforcement agencies are searching for better ways to build trust in their communities and many use community policing programs and strategies. After all, law enforcement is a public-trust-protection program, there to provide public and resource protection. It works best when conducted in a collaborative manner; Community-Public-Trust Policing 101.

One such program worth examining for its approach and policies is the California State Parks Department and their State Park Rangers (State Park Peace Officers). It is a unique department under the California Natural Resources Agency and includes a sizeable law enforcement function having mutual or concurrent policing jurisdiction with cities, counties, state and federal jurisdictions. Their peace officers have full enforcement authority that extends throughout the state. They provide public safety and resource protection to over 68 million annual visitors throughout approximately 1,600,000 acres; 1,658 miles of ocean and waterfront including 1/3rd of California’s coastline.

A peace office’s role is much larger than enforcing laws.  The spirit of the law and use of discretion when weighing the totality of circumstances are fundamental. California State Park Officers are privileged to be considered as Guardians by a majority of the public. A Guardian is an ally, someone that watches, protects and takes action.  Discretion and trust, essential to their role.

When basic values of providing public-trust protection are formally built into an organization’s policies, their practices generally follow those values. California State Parks has written policies that define expectations for their peace officers:
• Law Enforcement is, after all, a positive and necessary public service and a natural complement to the role as guardians and protectors.  With defined values, State Park Rangers are charged with the responsibility for protecting and preserving that which has been entrusted to their care.
• Rising crime and various social impacts now encroach upon places which have long been considered sanctuaries for peace and enjoyment. Regardless of the increased use and rising crime rate in parks (public places), all park visitors (community members) have the right to be treated with dignity and respect, and to be dealt with in a courteous and cordial manner.
• Law enforcement powers are only tools to achieve the goal of compliance.  In many cases, simply informing people that their behavior is illegal will result in compliance.  In other cases the reason for the law must be explained or written warnings issued to offenders.  For others, the threat of law enforcement action will be necessary, and there are cases in which the behavior of the violator is so serious/dangerous as to require immediate arrest or escalated force. The key to a successful law enforcement program therefore rests with the intelligence, judgment, and discretion of each officer.

The Department’s Community Policing policy provides additional direction:
• Reinforcing collaboration with the public; one in which its primary jurisdiction and the “community” do not exist independently.  Both are interdependent parts of a larger, more complex social economic and environmental system.  Community policing requires a fundamental change in responsibility for policing by law enforcement agencies alone, to a collaborative, community based system.
• Using the community, public-trust policing model, State Park Peace Officers and other department personnel are empowered to develop and maintain relationships with public agencies, community organizations, and businesses, to identify and solve/prevent problems of mutual concern.  Rather than focusing only on visible symptoms of crime, all partners work together, to address public safety, law enforcement and resource protection concerns.  With all parties participating, community members are better able to prevent or solve problems that erode society and public trust.

Law enforcement agencies with defined values, policy and respect, reinforced by continuous training, are best positioned to build real trust in their communities, for society and civilization.
#

Lynn Rhodes is an international consultant and the former Chief of California State Parks Law Enforcement Division. She can be reached at lynnrhodes2@hotmail.com

Annual Darwin Awards

Pajaronian
February 21, 2015
Laina Farhat-Holzman

Every year, I gather up notes on people so stupid that they should not add to the human gene pool. Alas, they do, but I would wish they wouldn't. Some of them are low hanging fruit, very obviously defective, but others really shouldn't be on this list at all. They ought to know better.

o     Boko Haram. Let us start with the low hanging fruit, which usually comes from the Muslim world. Boko Haram means: Western Learning is Forbidden. They believe the world is flat and water does not evaporate. They wave the Koran in the air (which they cannot read) and claim this makes them Muslim. Their talents include kidnapping schoolgirls and selling them in slave markets, which Sudanese Muslims run. They are also expert in decapitation and holding tourists for ransom. May they not reproduce and hopefully die off.

o     United Arab Emirates.   Their “General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment” issued a fatwa prohibiting any attempts to live on Mars as “un-Islamic.” Not that they have the capacity to do so, but “Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life that can never be justified in Islam.” Let it be so.

o     Pakistan. Police booked a 9-month old baby boy for attempted murder, charging him along with his family, who happened to be poor. The baby cried when he was fingerprinted, and a good lawyer intervened when he took it to the press and the world laughed at them. Such is Pakistani justice. The attempted murders were slum dwellers throwing stones at the gas service trying to disconnect homes illegally hooked up.

o     Also Pakistan.  Two brothers were arrested for the second time because they dig up bodies, cook, and eat them. Pakistan has no law against cannibalism. But they do have laws against women, sentencing to death a woman accused of illegal sex. Much more important, they say.

Now, to the much higher hanging fruit, our own recent battle against the very science that has made our western civilization so wonderful!  Our public health: safe water, clean air, modern medicine including pasteurization, safe drugs and surgical practices, childhood immunization, the end to childhood diseases that used to terrify and kill us-----all under threat by not only Darwin Award candidates in the Muslim World but by our own, who should know better----this the stuff of nightmares!

Very stupid and evil Muslim clerics have been responsible for halting the program that came close to eradicating polio and even smallpox from the world forever. They have told ignorant women that Western medicines were plots to make their children sterile! They have murdered health workers bravely going into remote villages bringing the medicines that would let their children grow into healthy adults. Now, there will be another generation of dead or cripples haunting their villages. That is just fine with them.

But where can I put western educated women who read articles on the Internet touting a British article by a defrocked and disowned doctor who claimed in a stupid study that childhood inoculations cause mental retardation and autism? A mother might be frightened, but what is the matter with her doctor who does not tell her in no uncertain terms that this is rubbish! And even worse, what is wrong with the politician, such as New Jersey Governor Christie, who has the nerve to say that “Parents deserve choice” when it comes to a matter of public health?  Choice?  What kind of choice do they have over an issue that affects the entire community?  Do they have choice over water supply?  Over life or death of their neighbors' babies?

What is happening here is an attack on science. Some Darwin Award candidates have decided that Pasteur was wrong. There are no germs. There is no Global Warming, and even when the water rises under their noses, they will say science is wrong. Measles is a kiddie disease. Why the fuss? The moonshot was a conspiracy made on a back lot in Hollywood. Well, folks, ISIS is looking for recruits. They will welcome you.

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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of God's Law or Man's Law.  You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.    

Torture Is Not In America's Best Interests

Pajaronian
January 24, 2015

Americans are debating several complex moral issues:
o     Does torture produce essential information at a time of terror activity?
o     Does torture do moral damage to the torturers themselves?
o     Does imminent danger warrant violating US law?

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. The 9/11 attack really frightened this country and the government went into emergency mode to find out if more attacks were on the way. This is the ticking bomb theory: do anything necessary to prevent more terror attacks.  And more terror attacks had been planned but were thwarted over the 13 years since 9/11.

When normal FBI or CIA vigilance can protect us as it has, we need to revisit “enhanced interrogation” (torture) as a means of getting information. There seems to be a majority view, even of operatives, that torture too often gets false information and the occasional truth could be obtained by other means. The Feinstein Report delivered on December 9 was a cry from the heart that America should not be doing such things and that we should admit we did, understand why, and resolve never to do it again. Her report was not advocating a witch-hunt against the intelligence community for what they did; torture had already been stopped by President Obama's order.

I agree with Feinstein's position, and it is obvious from some of her documentation that Americans charged with conducting torture were sickened by it. This speaks well for them because around the world, most other countries do not have such qualms. This was why most of this unpleasant business was outsourced to Lebanon or Egypt. The “World's” revulsion about the CIA's torture is pure hypocrisy!  Anti-torture zealots warn us that ISIS will read the report and use these tactics against hostages.  Baloney!  Isis uses a blunt instrument: decapitation. What information can they get from aid workers or tourists?

History of Torture.
Torture has been a judicial artifact from antiquity to today. From Assyrian times 4000 BC, we can see murals on their palace walls showing torture and decapitations. These were clearly propaganda tools to frighten anybody attempting resistance to their rule.

Rome used torture to punish people who threatened the state. Crucifixion was their public means of lingering execution, used after slave rebellions and most famously in Judea, when Jesus was swept up with other potential revolutionaries and crucified.

From the collapse of Rome to the 18th century in Europe, torture was a regular tool of the state to force prisoners to name accomplices or to ascertain the guilt of the prisoner. Trial by fire was such a mode. It was thought that an innocent person would not be burned. Obviously, there were no innocent persons.

There were periodic spasms of craziness in the late Middle Ages too: the Inquisition was the tool of the Spanish Catholic church to uncover insincere forced converts (Jews and once Muslims). After torture, the victims were burnt at the stake (further torture ending in death) with celebrating audiences watching. Eventually, the Inquisition deteriorated to torturing people accused by their jealous neighbors; the Church was also complicit because the accused's property could be confiscated.

The Protestant revolution brought with it a terror of witches. Hundreds of thousands of women---most old, some demented, and other victims of enemy neighbors---were hanged or burnt at the stake. The last case happened in New England: the Salem witchcraft trial. This spectacle sickened the new American colonists and it never happened again.

By the 18th century, along with a campaign to end the global institution of slavery (the Quakers did this) came a campaign to end judicial torture. Western civilization was the only place to do this. Torture remained in Islam, China, India, Russia. Torture returned hideously under the Nazis and USSR; the US disavowed this practice after the Cold War until 9/11. Fear made us revive it.

The greatest danger of any conflict is that the good guys start resembling the bad guys.  We must not let that happen. Our interrogators just have to be smarter than the terrorists they question. Torture, which is morally repugnant, is not needed.

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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of God's Law or Man's Law.  You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.    

Youth who seek “meaning” find it in bad places

Laina Farhat-Holzman
Sentinel
January 3, 2015

Intrepid TV journalists have managed to conduct interviews with some of the most puzzling Jihadis flocking to ISIS. It seems inconceivable that a French teen-ager raised as a Catholic in Normandy could choose to join ISIS and decapitate a prisoner on television. But when asked why he does this, he says that he hopes to die and go to heaven. He hates western civilization because it is corrupt, run by Jews, and full of shameless women who dare to show their faces and who do not defer to men.

Young women also flock to Syria where they babysit until selected by a “warrior” to become his sex-slave wife and bear his children, preferably boys. I can understand why young Muslim women would rebel against their oppressive home life and use Jihad as an excuse for a little adventure (and maybe sex); but it is more difficult to understand why any European woman with half a brain would convert to militant Islam. Even more puzzling are girls willing to become suicide bombers. Their status in Muslim Paradise is not a happy one. They will still serve men.

Why are these young people so dense?

o     Boredom and the search for adventure with the justification that it is religiously blessed.

o     Failure of the European host societies to integrate immigrants into their cultures, opting instead to keep them on the dole. These young people neither feel Muslim nor French, British, German, Danish, or Swedish. Becoming a Jihadi provides fellowship and solidarity, helped by serious brainwashing.

o     Reluctance of modern European countries to practice any sort of love of nation, believing that patriotism leads to war. However, without understanding the miracle of western civilization, students have the choice of believing in nothing or believing in a cleverly propagandized notion of the superiority of Islamism. ISIS makes a point of condemning national identity, creating instead an imaginary supra-nation, an Islamic caliphate. This gives them a flag they can salute, a black pirates' flag.

o     One cannot but wonder how much of this movement is the result of the terribly inbred first-cousin marriages preferred in the Muslim world, the consequences of which are producing anomalies and mental retardation. Don't they, and converts  from prisons, know that ISIS will kill them if they want to go home?

It is not popular among our teachers and intellectual elites to praise our own civilization. There is handwringing over Western colonialism that did such damage to the Muslim world while ignoring that the Muslim Turks colonized this region and retarded it for 500 years. It is not popular to note that Western colonial powers actually created nation states that had not been there before, and gave them the institutions to run them. India, for one, would not be a country without the British colonial administration.

The scientific revolution of the 18th century rose out of two millennia of western institutions: revival of the learning of ancient Greece and Rome, some dazzling Islamic science which flourished briefly and then died, and a religious reformation that permitted rational thought to supplant obedient belief.

The ancient institution of slavery (including the slavery of women) was only ended by Western civilization. Not enough credit is given, or taught in schools, about our emancipation of black slaves and women.

The UN's 2013 Slavery Index lists 29.8 million slaves worldwide, involuntary servitude, including children; enforced child marriage; and criminal sexual slave trafficking. Countries with the highest number of slaves are China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, Thailand, Congo, Burma, and Bangladesh. India dwarfs them all in sheer numbers.  But seven of ten countries with the largest percentage of slaves are Muslim. If all married women, not just underage brides, were included as slaves, the numbers would be even higher.

Since war has been declared on the Western world (as well as on the western-influenced Muslim world), we should revisit how we understand and support our own civilization. It may be chic to be a nihilist, but has never been smart.  We have a civilization worth fighting for. ISIS doesn't.

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Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of God's Law or Man's Law.  You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.