If this provocative book does not generate controversy, it will mean something truly dreadful is filling the headlines and news broadcasts. Author Samuel P. Huntington is willing to say flat out that the white, Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States was important and valuable, and is now endangered. Yet Huntington is not mired in some white-washed past. He's a respected political scientist with an endowed chair at Harvard...
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Who Are We? is both thoughtful and opinionated in a well researched, annotated, sourced and documented way. The main themes are:1. We are a nation that started as a group of dissenting English Protestant settlers who believed that one's Salvation was dependant on one's own actions and that success or failure was the responsibility of the individual through his own hard work. 2. We are a religious people, both historically...
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Franklin's quip "if you don't listen to reason she will surely rap your knuckles".....comes to mind when reading this book. As with "Clash Of Civilizations" Hunting methodically points out trends the elite don't want to hear- they would rather embrace abstract notions like "the end of history". In "Who Are We" Huntington illustrates how American identity is eroding - and how this is pushed by an elite who by and large are...
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When I told friends in 1999 that I had read Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", they called it a crazy and far fetched book. We then had 9-11 and people were told to better understand the issue they should read "Clash of Civilizations". One of the American trends today is that we look at our investments, policies, etc on short term trends. We also have a trend that states any new idea that goes against the grain of our...
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Back in 1993, Huntington's seminal article in Foreign Affairs "The Clash of Civilizations" was prescient about the violent clash between Islam and the West. It better explained the causes of 9/11 than most books written after 9/11! Now, Huntington's focus has turned inward to the changing identity of American society. He considers that the demographic explosion of Mexicans within the U.S. is causing a Clash of Civilizations...
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