A War for Civilization

Well, it's been quite a week for civilization in the USA. Try scrolling through the posts from the archives here from the past week for a sampling of craziness. Mark Steyn has noticed something, too:

This is my ancient column from that day, composed in the hours that followed, when very little was known. There are passages I would write differently today, and some I would not write at all, but I thought we would re-publish it as is, with the original (Spectator) illustration and headline. It was and is "a war for civilisation", but in ways I did not fully grasp until six months later, standing across the street from a Viennese maternity shop.

So here we are, a generation later, when no jihadist needs to fly planes into western skyscrapers - because, in New York as in London as in other western capitals, we have handed Islam the keys to those skyscrapers. In the excerpts from the flight manifests that appeared over the next few days, I was struck by the name of Christine Hanson of Groton, Massachusetts, a two-year-old girl sitting between her parents on a doomed flight. She was last heard crying in the background during her father's telephone call to her grandparents to report that the stewardess had been stabbed. Christine would be approaching thirty now - and I cannot but feel that the intervening years have dishonoured her memory:

Interesting to read what Steyn wrote 25 years ago. What has changed since then?

I would suggest that we might look back even further than yesterday's 25th anniversary, and think about what we want to teach the kids (a theme here last week). Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written a piece that reminds us that, while the details had not been worked out, there were people who had plans to attack the West long before 9/11.

What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us

In April 1996, more than five years before he steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, Mohamed Atta sat in a small Hamburg apartment and wrote his last will and testament. He was 27, an architecture student at the Technical University, the son of a Cairo lawyer, fluent in German, and living comfortably in one of the most affluent societies on earth.

Nothing in his circumstances compelled him to dwell on death. Yet he gave detailed instructions for the handling of his corpse. “I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter,” he wrote. He did not want a pregnant woman, or “a person who is not clean,” to come and say goodbye. The man who washed his body should wear gloves so as not to touch his genitals. He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned cloth, laid on his right side facing Mecca, and buried “next to good Muslims.” His money was to be divided “according to the Muslim religion as almighty God has asked us to do.”

There is no political program and no mention of foreign policy or economic grievances in the document. There is only a young Muslim man, in a German apartment, arranging to sacrifice his life to Allah in the confidence that Allah will reward his martyrdom in the life to come. The will was witnessed by fellow believers at the al-Quds mosque, where Atta prayed in Arabic, grew his beard, and where, four years later, he would meet the men he would die with.

The document is among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept. 11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for.

Yet for 25 years Western elites repeatedly insisted that men like Atta must have been driven by something other than the culture and the faith that provided him with a lens through which his actions seemed both sensible and necessary. After 9/11, intellectuals and policymakers asked “what went wrong?” as though the source of Atta’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery. In the Western experience, men had not killed other men over religious questions en masse since the end of the great religious wars of the 17th century. Culture, a term that was once understood to encompass a great many facets of human identity, experience, and belonging—religion included—had also been ruled out. Saying that cultural differences exist and should be respected was a foundation of the multicultural order; the idea that some cultures might lead people to murder each other, for reasons that do not appear in the Western rationalist list of sane causes, struck many Western liberals as too close to racism to bother arguing the point.

Since then, each time the West collided with Islam, much of the Western intellectual class reached for explanations that made sense within its own secular humanist categories: grievance, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who were, or must be, inherently no different than immigrants of similar age, class, and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland, or anyplace else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was assumed that they could be settled though material means. . .

Her insights into the thinking of Atta also have relevance to the current Iranian conflict.

But since Ayaan brought up settling conflicts through material means, we have other adversaries who are quite obsessed with materialism. Mayor Pete's dad translated the works of Gramsci into English, for example. You might want to share the insights below. I am including links to two versions:

Antonio Gramsci - The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century

Matty Laeh

Sep 06, 2026

PS: This is not my article, is a simple copy from the x account of Krzysztof Szczawinski ; - @Kristof_Poland (consider giving a follow, he has a lot of good articles about socialism)

I don’t usually do this, but he explained what Gramsci was and his ideas way better than I could (even thought I knew about Gramsci for years).

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2096207075386786042

Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.

Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who… https://t.co/jvd7MHKRDo pic.twitter.com/EB0fbaeyEL

— Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 (@Kristof_Poland) September 5, 2026

Quote

An election approaches.

We get what we allow

Poetry and Education

Have the kids watch this a few times, then give them the Coleridge https://t.co/4G4J0qnVLM

— Kieran Lawor (@KieranLawor) September 10, 2026

If you wanted to introduce an "I hate poetry" person to good poetry, what's the one poem you'd give them to read?

— Megan | @megievalist (@megievalist) September 10, 2026

The Week in Pictures: Smiling Through the Apocalypse Edition

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, September 5, "We have no dignity anymore"

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:18 AM

| Access Comments