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PHILCO magazine ad 1948 — Well-known for Quality the Planet More than …item 1.. How to Reverse the West’s Decline — Social cohesion is what Ibn Khaldun referred to as asabiyah (Sept 18, 2011 / 19 Elul 5771) …
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Folks live in towns and get utilised to luxuries. The rich grow indolent, the poor resentful. There is a loss of asabiyah, a keyword for Khaldun. Presently we would probably translate it as "social cohesion".
People no longer feel in terms of the frequent great. They are no longer willing to make sacrifices for 1 yet another. Primarily they drop the will to defend themselves.
They then grow to be easy prey for the desert dwellers, the people utilized to fighting to keep alive.
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…..item 1)…. site … aish.com … How to Reverse the West’s Decline … The greatest civilizations at some point fall due to their personal internal decay.
Sept 18, 2011 / 19 Elul 5771
by Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks
www.aish.com/ci/sept11/How_to_Reverse_the_Wests_Decline.html
It is not clear that the West has effectively met the challenge of 9/11. Worse: it is not clear that the West but completely understands what the challenge is.
To recognize 2001 we have to go back to 1989, the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the finish of the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an historic moment that few had expected. What did it imply? It was then that two stories had been born, with one of which we are familiar, the other of which we seem hardly to know or realize at all.
The 1st narrative was that the West had won. Communism had imploded. In the finish, it failed to deliver the goods. Folks wanted freedom. They sought affluence. The Soviet Union had delivered neither. Politically it was repressive. Economically it was inefficient. For freedom you want liberal democracy. For affluence you want the market place economy. 1989 marked the victory of each. From right here on democratic capitalism would spread slowly but certainly across the planet. To adapt Francis Fukuyama’s phrase of the time, it was the starting of the end of history.
—– Connected Articles: Remembering 9/11
The other narrative was fairly distinct but has the benefit of so far being proved correct. In contrast to Fukuyama’s, it was based not on Hegel but on the 14th-century Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun. We never know much about Ibn Khaldun in the West but we should. He was 1 of the genuinely fantastic thinkers of the Middle Ages. He has every single claim to be known as the world’s 1st sociologist. Not for one more 300 years would the West make a figure of comparable originality: Giambattista Vico. Each made compelling accounts of the rise and fall of civilizations. Each knew what most individuals most of the time forget: that the greatest civilizations ultimately fall. The explanation they do so is not necessarily the rise of a stronger energy. It is their personal internal decay.
Most accounts of al-Qaeda focus on the intellectual influence of the 20th-century thinker and critic of the West, Sayyid Qutb. That influence was actual. But the deeper story the leaders of al-Qaeda told in 1989, without having which 9/11 is unintelligible, had much less to do with Qutb and hatred of the West and its freedoms and considerably far more to do with the important precipitating occasion of the fall of Communism: the withdrawal, in 1989, of the Soviet army from Afghanistan.
People no longer believe in terms of the common very good. They are no longer prepared to make sacrifices for a single an additional.
It was that occasion that set in motion the fast collapse of one of the world’s two superpowers. It was achieved not by the United States and its military may possibly, but by a little group of religiously inspired fighters, the mujahideen and their helpers. Ibn Khaldun’s theory was that every single urban civilization becomes vulnerable when it grows decadent from within. Men and women live in towns and get utilized to luxuries. The rich develop indolent, the poor resentful. There is a loss of asabiyah, a keyword for Khaldun. These days we would probably translate it as "social cohesion". Folks no longer consider in terms of the widespread great. They are no longer willing to make sacrifices for 1 yet another. Basically they lose the will to defend themselves. They then grow to be straightforward prey for the desert dwellers, the men and women used to fighting to stay alive.
That, so it seemed to these who read history that way, is what happened in Afghanistan. It was never ever possible for a modest group to defeat a superpower by traditional signifies. But it could go on endlessly inflicting casualty right after casualty till sooner or later the superpower — far more like a lumbering elephant than a wounded lion — withdrew. The desert dwellers are hungrier, tougher and much more ruthless than the city dwellers who lengthy far more than anything for a quiet life.
That was the calculation. The odd thing is, it worked. And these who had fought the Soviet Union looked on in wonder at the impact of their victory. For not only did the Russians withdraw. Within an extraordinarily quick time their complete empire collapsed. Ibn Khaldun was appropriate. The society had grown rotten from inside. It had lost its asabiyah, its cohesion. It had lost the will to fight.
If that is what a little group of hugely motivated religious fighters could do to one superpower, why not the other, America and the West? America could not be defeated on its personal ground. But what if it could be tempted, provoked, into occupying the extremely exact same ground that had seen the humiliating withdrawal of the Soviet army, namely Afghanistan itself? To do so would call for a truly enormous provocation, 1 so shocking that it would make the Americans forget what everybody knew, that Afghanistan is a death trap that in the end defeats all invading armies. That is when 9/11 was born.
—– Related Report: 9/11: Launching the War of Tips
The theory was that the Americans and the Russians might be unalike in every single other respect, but this they shared: that they had been sophisticated urban civilizations in which the social bond, asabiyah, had grown weak. They have been no longer lean and hungry. They were overweight and lacked the capacity for sustained sacrifice. If America could be provoked into occupying Afghanistan, it could be defeated specifically as the Soviets had been, not by any decisive battle but by sustained asymmetric warfare. The proof was that American troops had withdrawn from Lebanon in 1984 and Somalia in 1994 below just such circumstances. They had no a lot more staying power than the Russians. Like the Russians, within a decade they would be searching for an exit strategy. 9/11 was the attempt to lure the United States into Afghanistan, and it worked.
The aim of al-Qaeda never ever was the collapse of the West. It was the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, with each other with larger aspirations for the revival of the Caliphate and the reemergence of the Umma as a globe power. But the collapse of the West was foreseen. It was not an aim but a consequence, and it followed from Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the decline and fall of civilizations.
Has it occurred? Not yet. But ten years on, the United States has been humiliated into renegotiating its trillions of dollars of debt. Western economies, virtually all of them, are ailing. The European Union is under strain, its future in doubt. There have been riots and looting on the streets of London and Manchester, just as there have been in recent years in France, Greece and Spain. The global economy appears far much less steady than it did prior to the collapse of 2008. In Europe, following a series of scandals, bankers, politicians, journalists and even the police have been tried and discovered wanting. Those who read the runes of the future are turning their eyes eastward to India, China, and the quickly-growing economies of south-east Asia. The West no longer looks invincible. As a narrative, the "end of history" has proved significantly less predictive than the "decline of civilizations". So far, Hegel , Ibn Khaldun 1.
—– The actual challenge is the underlying moral overall health of Western liberal democracies, their collective responsibility, and to the ideals that brought them into getting.
The true challenge of 9/11 is not what it seemed at the time: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb and radical Islam. These were real and present threats, to be certain, but they have been symptoms, not cause. The challenge was the underlying moral well being of Western liberal democracies, their asabiyah, their sense of identity and collective responsibility, their commitment to a single one more and to the ideals that brought them into becoming. The counter-narrative of 1989 and the fall of Soviet Communism saw it not as a victory for the West but as portion of a law of history that says: all excellent civilizations eventually decline, and the West will be the next to go.
That view is not restricted to enemies of the West. It was most lately stated by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson in his Civilization: The West and the Rest. It was most powerfully formulated by Alasdair MacIntyre in his masterwork, Soon after Virtue. My favourite version of it comes from Bertrand Russell in the introduction to his History of Western Philosophy, speaking about the tendency of the most inventive civilizations to self-destruct:
What had occurred in the fantastic age of Greece happened once again in Renaissance Italy. Classic moral restraints disappeared, since they had been noticed to be related with superstition the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and inventive, making a rare florescence of genius but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, below the domination of nations much less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.
Social cohesion is what Ibn Khaldun referred to as asabiyah. And Russell’s description of Renaissance Italy fits precisely the postmodern, late capitalist West, with its urge to spend and its failure to save, its moral relativism and hyper-individualism, its political culture of rights without having responsibilities, its aggressive secularism and resentment of any morality of self-restraint, and its failure to inculcate the habits of instinctual deferral that Sigmund Freud saw as the really basis of civilization. Sayyid Qutb hated the West. Ibn Khaldun would have pitied the West. The pity is a lot more critical than the hate.
There is a straightforward decision before us. Will we continue to act in ignorance of this other narrative? If so, we will replicate the fate of Greece in the second pre-Christian century as described by Polybius ("the people of Hellas had entered on the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness"), and that of Rome two centuries later, when Livy wrote about "how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first subsided, as it have been, then sank reduced and decrease, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to our present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their remedy." If we carry on as we are going, the West will decline and fall.
There is, to my thoughts, only one particular sane option. That is to do what England and America did in the 1820s. Those two societies, deeply secularized soon after the rationalist 18th century, scarred and fractured by the issues of industrialization, calmly set about remoralising themselves, thereby renewing themselves.
The 3 decades, 1820-1850, saw an unprecedented proliferation of groups dedicated to social, political and educational reform-building schools, YMCAs, orphanages, beginning temperance groups, charities, friendly societies, campaigning for the abolition of slavery, corporal punishment and inhumane working conditions, and working for the extension of voting rights. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by what he saw in America and the identical process was happening at the exact same time in Britain.
Men and women did not leave it to government or the marketplace. They did it themselves in communities, congregations, groups of each shape and size. They understood the connection between morality and morale. They knew that only a society held collectively by a strong moral bond, by asabiyah, has any chance of succeeding in the lengthy run. That collective work of remoralization eventually made Britain the greatest globe power in the 19th century and America in the 20th.
—– None of us ought to be in any doubt as to the seriousness of what is at stake.
It is a peculiarity of the Abrahamic monotheisms that they see, at the heart of society, the idea of covenant. Covenantal politics are politics with a goal, driven by higher ideals, amongst them the sanctity of life, the dignity of the person, the rule of justice and compassion, and concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. G.K. Chesterton named America a "nation with the soul of a church". Britain employed to be like that as well. In the 1950s there was no tv at specific hours on Sunday so as not to deter churchgoing. Sundays helped maintain households collectively, families helped keep communities collectively, and communities helped maintain society with each other. I, a Jew increasing up in a Christian nation, did not really feel threatened by this. I felt supported by it — much much more than I do now in an ostensibly more tolerant but in fact far a lot more abrasive, rude and aggressive society.
What is distinctive about covenant is its seemingly endless possibility of renewal. It happened in the Bible in the days of Joshua, Josiah and Ezra. It happened in America amongst 1820 and 1850 in the Second Wonderful Awakening. It happened in Britain at the exact same time by way of the wonderful Victorian social reformers and philanthropists. Covenant defeats the law of entropy that says that all systems shed energy more than time. It creates renewable power. It has the power to arrest, even reverse, the decline and fall of nations.
None of us ought to be in any doubt as to the seriousness of what is at stake. Europe today is pursuing the chimera of societies with no a shared moral code, nations without having a collective identity, cultures with out a respect for tradition, groups with no a concern for the common excellent, and politics without having the slightest sense of history. Ibn Khaldun, had been he alive, would inform them precisely exactly where that leads.
The question is not radical Islam but, does the West think in itself any far more? Is it capable of renewing itself as it did two centuries ago? Or will it crumble as did the Soviet Union from internal decay. "We have met the enemy," mentioned the cartoon character Pogo, "and he is us." That is the challenge of 9/11. It is about time we came with each other to meet it.
This post originally appeared in Standpoint Magazine. standpointmag.co.uk/
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98288 – AUG10 2013 … FSU News – West alleges excessive force by TPD in federal lawsuit (Mar. 19, 2014 four:59 PM) …
Image by marsmet534
A TPD internal-affairs report “exonerated” the officers on allegations they utilized excessive force, but it discovered that Ormerod and Smidt demonstrated conduct unbecoming an officer and Creamer and Faust violated common operating procedures by not questioning the officers about West’s injuries and not offering her assist. All four officers were suspended.
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“The force was so extreme that it triggered a number of injuries which includes fractures, nerve harm to (her) face, impairment in the vision in her right eye, a permanent black eye and many other painful situations for which she continues to suffer to this day,” the lawsuit says.
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Thursday, April three, 2014
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… marsmet491 photo … TPD (Leon County, Florida) … Christina West DUI Arrest Shows Feasible Police Brutality By Tallahassee Cops (GRAPHIC VIDEO) — Updated: 09/10/2013 7:26 pm EDT …item 2b.. Apollo 440 – 1997 – Electro Glide In Blue. …
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… marsmet511 photo … Never TREAD ON ME !!! … Tallahassee Police Brutality: Slam Woman’s Face Into Pavement For the duration of Arrest (September 11, 2013) — Arresting Officer Chris Ormerod ….
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… Sunday, September 15, 2013 … Tallahassee Democrat Newspaper … Page 4A …
— OFFICER BIOS
… OFFICER CHRISTOPHER ORMEROD
… Age: 28
… Rank: Police Officer
… Assignment: Patrol
… Supervisor: Sgt. Bill Faust
… Date of Employ: Jan. 22, 2008
… Years of service: 5
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— OFFICER BIOS
… OFFICER MATTHEW SMIDT
… Age: 38
… Rank: Police Officer, field coaching officer
… Assignment: Patrol
… Present supervisor: Sgt. George Creamer, Jr.
… Date of employ: Dec. 11, 2007
… Years of service: five
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Source: TPD
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…..item 1)…. West alleges excessive force by TPD in federal lawsuit …
… FSU News … www.fsunews.com/ …
FSU News / section / News … www.fsunews.com/section/NEWS …
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img code photo … Police video of DUI arrest of Christina West …
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98288 … Aug10 2013
03:56:23AM
bcdownload.gannett.edgesuite.net/tallahassee/41801896001/…
Police video of DUI arrest of Christina West: Contains graphic content material. Christina West is suing the city of Tallahassee and four TPD officers, alleging excessive force in the course of her DUI arrest final summer time.
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Written by
Jeff Burlew
Democrat Senior Writer
FILED Below
News
Mar. 19, 2014 4:59 PM |
www.fsunews.com/write-up/20140319/NEWS/140319017/West-alle…
Christina West, who was left bloodied by police throughout a DUI arrest last summer time that was caught on dramatic dash-cam video, is suing the city of Tallahassee and 4 officers involved in the incident.
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img code photo … Christina West is suing the city of Tallahassee and 4 TPD officers
cmsimg.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=CD&D…
Christina West is suing the city of Tallahassee and four TPD officers, claiming excessive force in the course of her DUI arreChristina West is suing the city of Tallahassee and four TPD officers, claiming excessive force throughout her DUI arrest last summer. / Special to the Democratst final summer season. / Special to the Democrat
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West, along with her husband David West, filed a lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Tallahassee alleging that officers with the Tallahassee Police Division violated her constitutional rights when they beat and injured her for the duration of the arrest.
The Wests, who notified the city of their intent to sue last year, are searching for an unspecified quantity in compensatory and punitive damages. Named as defendants in the lawsuit are TPD officers Matthew Smidt and Chris Ormerod along with their supervisors who were at the scene, Sgts. George Creamer Jr. and William Faust.
The West case rocked each City Hall and TPD, prompting Chief Dennis Jones to step down only days following the Tallahassee Democrat released the dash-came video of the arrest. A Leon County grand jury later found that officers had been responsible for West’s injuries, although it opted not to charge any of the officers with a crime or advise that they be fired.
A TPD internal-affairs report “exonerated” the officers on allegations they used excessive force, but it discovered that Ormerod and Smidt demonstrated conduct unbecoming an officer and Creamer and Faust violated regular operating procedures by not questioning the officers about West’s injuries and not delivering her support. All four officers were suspended.
West was arrested in the early morning hours of Aug. 10 following crashing her SUV into an unoccupied house in Killearn Estates with 3 foreign-exchange students in the automobile. She and the students have been returning from a day trip to Panama City Beach she admitted to officers she had drunk a couple of beers earlier in the day and taken pain medication.
The lawsuit says Smidt and Ormerod asked West to take component in roadside sobriety tests soon after the crash. She agreed, but warned the officers she had surgery lately and was due to have far more surgery. Soon after taking the tests, the lawsuit says Ormerod improperly placed West in handcuffs that were as well modest for her wrists and put her in the back of his squad car.
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West agreed to take a breath test, and as officers were reading an implied consent warning to her, they noticed she was no longer in her handcuffs. As she got out of the car, she was “aggressively grabbed by each officers,” according to the lawsuit.
“Both of them aggressively seized her utilizing pressure points applied to a variety of parts of her physique causing acute and considerable pain,” the lawsuit states. “Officer Smidt then forcibly struck Mrs. West in the back of the head and continued the momentum of his blow slamming Mrs. West’s face into the rear windshield of the patrol car. Both officers then forcefully slammed Mrs. West onto the pavement face-1st. (Her) face struck the pavement with such force that it bounced off the pavement and slammed into the pavement once more.”
Once on the ground, Smidt pushed her face into the pavement, with his hands pressing down on her neck, where she has numerous screws and pins in spot from three previous surgeries, the lawsuit states. At the exact same time, Ormerod wrenched her arms up and straddled her with one knee gouging into her right hip, near a labral tear for which surgery had been scheduled.
“The force was so serious that it triggered numerous injuries which includes fractures, nerve harm to (her) face, impairment in the vision in her appropriate eye, a permanent black eye and quite a few other painful situations for which she continues to endure to this day,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit accuses TPD of making use of excessive force, intentionally inflicting emotional distress and fabricating proof. It also says the city employs policies and coaching that are “substantially certain” to lead to constitutional violations and that TPD routinely makes it possible for abusive officers to stay on the force.
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