An Open Letter To Europe

We all tend to judge others—people and other societies—by our own standards.

An article on The American Thinker Website (http://www.americanthinker.com) made me stop and think about all of the hate America campaigns in Europe lately

The article, titled "An Open Letter to Europe", was written by Herbert E. Meyer. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA\'s National Intelligence Council. His DVD (http://www.siegeofwesternciv.com) is a nationwide best-seller.

I wrote Mr. Meyer an e-mail to ask permission to reprint the article. He kindly agreed. We should all read it. Here is what he had to say to Europe on November 11, 2004:

"Hi. Are you nuts?

"Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I\'m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds. One of Britain\'s largest newspapers ran a headline asking "How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb?", and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word - bizarre -- to explain the election\'s outcome to their readers. In Germany the editors of Die Tageszeitung responded to our vote by writing that "Bush belongs at a war tribunal - not in the White House." And on a London radio talk show last week one Jeremy Hardy described our President and those of us who voted for him as "stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists."

"Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren\'t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you\'re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest). But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso - and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world\'s finest universities and five or six of the world\'s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world\'s most vibrant economy, are the world\'s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars -- may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?

"We believe that church and state should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life. We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions. We believe that individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by the State, and that marriage should take place only between a man and a woman. We believe that rights must be balanced by responsibilities, that personal freedom is a privilege we must be careful not to abuse, and that the rule of law cannot be set aside when it becomes inconvenient. We believe in economic liberty, and in the right of purposeful and industrious entrepreneurs to run their businesses – and thus create jobs - with a minimum of government interference. We recognize that other people see things differently, and we are tolerant of their views. But we believe that our country is worth defending, and if anyone decides that killing us is an okay thing to do we will go after them with everything we\'ve got.

"If these beliefs seem strange to you, they shouldn\'t. For these are precisely the beliefs that powered Western Europe—you—from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, on to the Enlightenment, and forward into the modern world. They are the beliefs that made Europe itself the glory of Western civilization and - not coincidentally - ignited the greatest outpouring of art, literature, music and scientific discovery the world has ever known including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Isaac Newton and Descartes.

"It is your abandonment of these beliefs that has created the gap between Europe and the United States. You have ceased to be a Judeo-Christian culture, and have become instead a secular culture. And a secular culture quickly goes from being "un-religious" to anti-religious. Indeed, your hostility to the basic concepts of Judaism and Christianity has literally been written into your new European Union constitution, despite the Pope\'s heroic efforts to the contrary.

"Your rate of marriage is at an all-time low, and the number of abortions in Europe is at an all-time high. Indeed, your birth rates are so far below replacement levels that in 30 years or so there will be 70 million fewer Europeans alive than are alive today. Europe is literally dying. And of the children you do manage to produce, all too few will be raised in stable, two-parent households.

"Your economy is stagnant because your government regulators make it just about impossible for your entrepreneurs to succeed - except by fleeing to the United States, where we welcome them and celebrate their success.

"And your armed forces are a joke. With the notable exception of Great Britain, you no longer have the military strength to defend yourselves. Alas, you no longer have the will to defend yourselves.

"What worries me even more than all this is your willful blindness. You refuse to see that it is you, not we Americans, who have abandoned Western Civilization. It\'s worrisome because, to tell you the truth, we need each other. Western Civilization today is under siege, from radical Islam on the outside and from our own selfish hedonism within. It\'s going to take all of our effort, our talent, our creativity and, above all, our will to pull through. So take a good, hard look at yourselves and see what your own future will be if you don\'t change course. And please, stop sneering at America long enough to understand it. After all, Western Civilization was your gift to us, and you ought to be proud of what we Americans have made of it."

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41589

I would appreciate it if people like this would stop writing as if they are speaking for the whole United States of America.  Everywhere he writes "we believe this" and "we believe that," he should be writing "HALF of us believe this" and "HALF of us believe that."  

Almost everything he cites as a criticism of Europe are things I LIKE about Europe.

Originally posted by Coredweller
I would appreciate it if people like this would stop writing as if they are speaking for the whole United States of America.  Everywhere he writes "we believe this" and "we believe that," he should be writing "HALF of us believe this" and "HALF of us believe that."  

Almost everything he cites as a criticism of Europe are things I LIKE about Europe.

*waits for fastson to see this*

[GmanJoe]

Originally posted by Coredweller
I would appreciate it if people like this would stop writing as if they are speaking for the whole United States of America.  Everywhere he writes "we believe this" and "we believe that," he should be writing "HALF of us believe this" and "HALF of us believe that."  

Almost everything he cites as a criticism of Europe are things I LIKE about Europe.

You can always get a one way ticket there.

Originally posted by GmanJoe
You can always get a one way ticket there.

.... I can\'t refrain...

I wonder how Honda S2000\'s handle in snow?

Originally posted by GmanJoe
You can always get a one way ticket there.

Why should I leave, when you are the one who\'s wrong?  

Originally posted by Coredweller
Why should I leave, when you are the one who\'s wrong?  

We are right - 51 percent.  

[GmanJoe]

Cored, it wouldn\'t matter where you go. You\'ll never be happy. You\'re a hippy Californian, remember?

"We believe that church and state should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life. We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions."

I was actually listening to what he had to say untill that part.

DH skip that part... I skipped the last sentence, but a lot of what he had to say is interesting.

If I were you, I would not so blithely cast my fate with these religious zealots, Giga.  This guy thinks that "religion should remain at the center of life."  Is it at the center of your life?  If not, how long before someone starts doubting your loyalty to the USA because it isn\'t?

Cored has a good point with his last post.  Though he only commented on one aspect, this entire open letter is just full of holes.

"Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren\'t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you\'re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest). But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso - and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world\'s finest universities and five or six of the world\'s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world\'s most vibrant economy, are the world\'s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars -- may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?

With the exception of the Mars lander, which was designed and built well before Bush took office anyhow, all of those positive aspects occurred before his watch which is what the European public is directly criticizing.  You can roll all of the accomplishments of the nation into one ball of positive outcomes, but you can\'t use them to defend the current administration.

We believe that church and state should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life. We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions. We believe that individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by the State, and that marriage should take place only between a man and a woman.

This is just plain silly.  More children will become property of the state as time passes with what the government is considering doing, but I\'ll get into that later.  The ten commandments are a great set of morales, but rather then commandments, they should just be considered common sense and people can live by them without having to follow every guideline of the bible.  Society has changed an incredible amount since its inception and it should be changed and edited to make way for its evolution.  Homosexuals, Jews, and women are all targeted by the bible in one way or another and if we took those teachings to heart, each group would be easily set back by 200 or more years of hard fought for rights against some of the most rigid persecution in history.

We believe that rights must be balanced by responsibilities, that personal freedom is a privilege we must be careful not to abuse, and that the rule of law cannot be set aside when it becomes inconvenient. We believe in economic liberty, and in the right of purposeful and industrious entrepreneurs to run their businesses – and thus create jobs - with a minimum of government interference. We recognize that other people see things differently, and we are tolerant of their views. But we believe that our country is worth defending, and if anyone decides that killing us is an okay thing to do we will go after them with everything we\'ve got.

And in the case that no Americans have been harmed by some other country and no ties can be found to the contrary, we will invade anyways to preserve freedom from a possible threat -- or at least that\'s what our excuse will be when it comes time to answer for our decision.  We will not cop to the fact that our acceptable and brilliant free economy was somehow one of the motivating factors behind our invasion.

"If these beliefs seem strange to you, they shouldn\'t. For these are precisely the beliefs that powered Western Europe—you—from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, on to the Enlightenment, and forward into the modern world. They are the beliefs that made Europe itself the glory of Western civilization and - not coincidentally - ignited the greatest outpouring of art, literature, music and scientific discovery the world has ever known including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Isaac Newton and Descartes.

Indeed.  You\'ll get no arguments from me.  Just in that time, living as an artist was something to be admired and revered while today it\'s niche and poor and those who do make a handsome living doing such a thing are perverted into false success stories promoting the American dream which is now just a cliche of false hopes and impractical dreams.  Heck, even dreaming up the possibility of something better today is somewhat taboo let alone striving to achieve it.

"It is your abandonment of these beliefs that has created the gap between Europe and the United States. You have ceased to be a Judeo-Christian culture, and have become instead a secular culture. And a secular culture quickly goes from being "un-religious" to anti-religious. Indeed, your hostility to the basic concepts of Judaism and Christianity has literally been written into your new European Union constitution, despite the Pope\'s heroic efforts to the contrary.

The pope is heroic?  Wow.  In the 1960\'s when Kennedy was running for office, one of the key elements working against him was that he was Catholic and that Americans supposedly didn\'t want a president to be acting on the beliefs of the pope and because Nixon didn\'t target that specific aspect of Kennedy (no matter how incorrect it may have been), it cost him the election.  Although the world as a whole has been becoming less relgiously centric in the past 40 years since that election, we\'re now taking steps backwards and considering the pope a hero?  That\'s amazing.

"Your rate of marriage is at an all-time low, and the number of abortions in Europe is at an all-time high. Indeed, your birth rates are so far below replacement levels that in 30 years or so there will be 70 million fewer Europeans alive than are alive today. Europe is literally dying. And of the children you do manage to produce, all too few will be raised in stable, two-parent households.

Umm... marriage in the US is at an all time high.  We\'re even considering nullifying Roe v Wade and removing a woman\'s right to choose which would lead to many more STATE RAISED children.  People in our country would rather adopt children from other countries then to adopt ones from here.  As for family values, we have the highest divorce rate in the world.  Having a high marriage rate means nothing if the divorce rate matches it -- so much for family values.

"Your economy is stagnant because your government regulators make it just about impossible for your entrepreneurs to succeed - except by fleeing to the United States, where we welcome them and celebrate their success.

Which is why American business owners farm out their production and tech support and so many other aspects of their businesses overseas and other companies, the biggest ones in their fields of industry, such as EA and Walmart, are facing class action lawsuits regarding poor employee treatment and unfair wages.

"And your armed forces are a joke. With the notable exception of Great Britain, you no longer have the military strength to defend yourselves. Alas, you no longer have the will to defend yourselves.

This is kind of ridiculous.  A lot of the treaties we have signed with a lot of these countries don\'t permit them to build up considerable amounts of arms.  What good is building a bigger and better attack fighter when you can\'t build nuclear weapons?  Aside from the technology aspects however, many European countries have mandatory military service.  If a country mobilizes for war however, the entire population, or at least a large majority of it, is used.  During peace time, why bother?  Our service is voluntary as is and our military is pretty friggin small in terms of manpower, but we do have the most and largest bombs on Earth.  If any country would be stupid enough to directly attack us, there wouldn\'t be anything left of them in the end and we\'ve already proved once that we wouldn\'t hesistate to use them, even on a beaten society.

"What worries me even more than all this is your willful blindness. You refuse to see that it is you, not we Americans, who have abandoned Western Civilization. It\'s worrisome because, to tell you the truth, we need each other. Western Civilization today is under siege, from radical Islam on the outside and from our own selfish hedonism within. It\'s going to take all of our effort, our talent, our creativity and, above all, our will to pull through. So take a good, hard look at yourselves and see what your own future will be if you don\'t change course. And please, stop sneering at America long enough to understand it. After all, Western Civilization was your gift to us, and you ought to be proud of what we Americans have made of it."

Again, Europeans hate Bush, not Americans, but recently that has shifted since Americans, at least 51% of them,  voted for Bush again.  I\'m sure they wouldn\'t say anything about any of us negatively if Kerry had won.

[SirMystiq]

Originally posted by Ryu
Cored has a good point with his last post.  Though he only commented on one aspect, this entire open letter is just full of holes.



With the exception of the Mars lander, which was designed and built well before Bush took office anyhow, all of those positive aspects occurred before his watch which is what the European public is directly criticizing.  You can roll all of the accomplishments of the nation into one ball of positive outcomes, but you can\'t use them to defend the current administration.



This is just plain silly.  More children will become property of the state as time passes with what the government is considering doing, but I\'ll get into that later.  The ten commandments are a great set of morales, but rather then commandments, they should just be considered common sense and people can live by them without having to follow every guideline of the bible.  Society has changed an incredible amount since its inception and it should be changed and edited to make way for its evolution.  Homosexuals, Jews, and women are all targeted by the bible in one way or another and if we took those teachings to heart, each group would be easily set back by 200 or more years of hard fought for rights against some of the most rigid persecution in history.



And in the case that no Americans have been harmed by some other country and no ties can be found to the contrary, we will invade anyways to preserve freedom from a possible threat -- or at least that\'s what our excuse will be when it comes time to answer for our decision.  We will not cop to the fact that our acceptable and brilliant free economy was somehow one of the motivating factors behind our invasion.



Indeed.  You\'ll get no arguments from me.  Just in that time, living as an artist was something to be admired and revered while today it\'s niche and poor and those who do make a handsome living doing such a thing are perverted into false success stories promoting the American dream which is now just a cliche of false hopes and impractical dreams.  Heck, even dreaming up the possibility of something better today is somewhat taboo let alone striving to achieve it.



The pope is heroic?  Wow.  In the 1960\'s when Kennedy was running for office, one of the key elements working against him was that he was Catholic and that Americans supposedly didn\'t want a president to be acting on the beliefs of the pope and because Nixon didn\'t target that specific aspect of Kennedy (no matter how incorrect it may have been), it cost him the election.  Although the world as a whole has been becoming less relgiously centric in the past 40 years since that election, we\'re now taking steps backwards and considering the pope a hero?  That\'s amazing.



Umm... marriage in the US is at an all time high.  We\'re even considering nullifying Roe v Wade and removing a woman\'s right to choose which would lead to many more STATE RAISED children.  People in our country would rather adopt children from other countries then to adopt ones from here.  As for family values, we have the highest divorce rate in the world.  Having a high marriage rate means nothing if the divorce rate matches it -- so much for family values.



Which is why American business owners farm out their production and tech support and so many other aspects of their businesses overseas and other companies, the biggest ones in their fields of industry, such as EA and Walmart, are facing class action lawsuits regarding poor employee treatment and unfair wages.



This is kind of ridiculous.  A lot of the treaties we have signed with a lot of these countries don\'t permit them to build up considerable amounts of arms.  What good is building a bigger and better attack fighter when you can\'t build nuclear weapons?  Aside from the technology aspects however, many European countries have mandatory military service.  If a country mobilizes for war however, the entire population, or at least a large majority of it, is used.  During peace time, why bother?  Our service is voluntary as is and our military is pretty friggin small in terms of manpower, but we do have the most and largest bombs on Earth.  If any country would be stupid enough to directly attack us, there wouldn\'t be anything left of them in the end and we\'ve already proved once that we wouldn\'t hesistate to use them, even on a beaten society.



Again, Europeans hate Bush, not Americans, but recently that has shifted since Americans, at least 51% of them,  voted for Bush again.  I\'m sure they wouldn\'t say anything about any of us negatively if Kerry had won.

I\'m with this guy ^^^

Great post Ryu.

And before Giga says it:

I am kissing up.

Well, 51% of the Americans WHO VOTED went for Bush.

Damn teenagers. The could of swayed that damn election!

[SirMystiq]

Originally posted by Coredweller
I would appreciate it if people like this would stop writing as if they are speaking for the whole United States of America.  Everywhere he writes "we believe this" and "we believe that," he should be writing "HALF of us believe this" and "HALF of us believe that."  

Almost everything he cites as a criticism of Europe are things I LIKE about Europe.

^^^

Agreed.

And that "get out if you don\'t like it" post by Gman was very predictable.

And aren\'t people taking your word for it every since the elections. Canada is probably full of US people by now.

Wow mystiq, when you hopped the border you only made it into Texas.  How do you plan on getting all the way to Canada now?