Scott Austin’s Nov. 26 guest commentary (“Prevailing American sentiment supports iron fist,” ODE, Nov. 26) makes much of other people’s presumed illiteracy. That Austin has gotten as far as he has while remaining so culturally illiterate is no less alarming. His letter is a perfect object lesson of the maxim “Repeat a lie often enough and it will be believed as truth.” As a self-described “fascist” (“New Campus Rebels,” Eugene Weekly, Nov. 20), I assume Austin is at least historically literate enough to be aware of this tried and true method of Goebbels’.
The myth of Islamic “backward”-ness Austin believes and promotes is betrayed by the fact that places like Jerusalem, Damascus, Alexandria, Moorish Spain and, more recently, Beirut were long considered to be models of religious and cultural pluralism. Centuries of Christian crusades, Western colonialism and, in the case of Lebanon, intervention by Israel, have put an end to this. In short, the kind of Western imperialism which Austin dismisses, not abstract but manifested daily in the form of human and cultural poverty and death, has gone a long way toward creating the heinous situation that the United States and its few allies now face. Indeed, the problem with Islam is not its backwardness, it is its very modernity. Contemporary scholars, like the late Edward Said, point out that the Islamic radicalism currently being embraced by some is a thoroughly recent development. It is a reaction to the devastating, atomizing effects of industrialism and capitalism that have shaken the foundations of traditional societies worldwide. As such, Islamic radicalism has much in common with the conservative-Christian radicalism Austin himself embraces. They complement each other perfectly as evidenced by Austin’s own goose-stepping, flag-waving creed as well as the sentiments of Toby Keith that Austin defends.