Domestric and Foreign Legions
Censorship and Double-Dealing at Boston College is how Dinesh D’Souza describes his battle with that school over releasing the transcripts of his debate last April with Alan Wolfe, who heads the Boisi Center for Religion at Boston College. Wolfe and the New York Times aside, the more vicious attacks on D’Souza and his book The Enemy at Home: the cultural left and its responsibility for 9/11, New York: Doubleday, 2007, are at the author’s own blog. One commenter, Richter, calls him a whining “Ayatollah D’Souza. (I shall leave the more detail comments available through the previous link.) Even among ourselves, civility is dying among Conservatives. Last March, at the Town Hall Gatherings I attend in Madison, Wisconsin, there was disagreement short of denial to D’Souza contention on current American resolve:
‘It was read to the group this passage from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book: “Since liberalism and conservatism are the guiding principles of the Democratic and Republican Parties, the two major parties have become strange to each other in a way that America has not seen since 1860,, when one faction saw slavery as a “positive good” and the other saw it as an entrenched evil. Now, as then, the two sides have difficulty recognizing each other as legitimate, as fully American, as possessing the same moral decency that we all take for granted in ourselves. The vicious liberal attacks on Bush, which parallel the vicious conservative attacks on Clinton, are a way of saying, “We have difficulty recognizing you as human beings who inhabit the same moral planet that we do. Consequently we see you as usurpers and moral reprobates who should be hounded and driven from the corridors of power by any means necessary.”‘ (Ibid., The Enemy at Home, page 62.)
In this intolerance, is an U.S. Foreign Legion possible? The war isn’t just over-seas, it is here as D’Souza concludes: “there is no way to restore the culture without winning the war on terror. Conversely, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals aboard, we must defeat the enemy at home.” (Ibid., The Enemy at Home, page 292.)
