An interesting confluence: yesterday, two readers of Glenn Reynolds' sent him their apparently heartfelt desire to destroy Islam, and today Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Stuttaford are volleying back and forth on what drives murderous cultures and movements.
Glenn's unwelcome correspondents are falling for the best-selling lie of dictatorship: that a totalitarian state or a malignant culture is a popular choice rather than a perversion forced or foisted upon the whole by a violent minority. If one knows a sliver about the Crusades, it's that they had as much to do with Christ's teachings as Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 had to do with Mohammed's. The Near East is neither despotic because it is Muslim nor Muslim because it is despotic: if the region were doomed to barbarity, "1/30/05" would have no meaning and Hamed Karzai would be long dead.
How many cultures started out free? None. Goldberg and Stuttaford won't have much luck settling their argument as they are proceeding currently, searching for a denominator among multiples. The greatest threat to maintaining liberty and enacting liberalization is not culture, nor religion, nor tradition but the tiny cut of sociopaths and worldly enablers who forever try and make all that defines man as man into a fulcrum to wrench civilization back into animalism, where might alone is king. Religion is only one wedge, the means of distribution just one other. That dominative cut is in America, too, but our common good has kept most authoritarians down at the level of crooks and cranks. Where despotism reigns, the crooks rule. It's a matter of who's in charge.