DEUS LO VOLT! :

Hooray for the Crusades! (Piers Paul Read, Spring 2002, Independent Women's Forum)

Were the Middle Ages really so bad? We may look back with horror to the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, and the Crusades; but do they compare so unfavorably in the scales of human suffering with the trenches, the gulags, and the concentration camps, products of the supposedly enlightened twentieth century? Today, as throughout human history, ideological zeal is often used to justify the amoral pursuit of selfish interests. We in the west may feel confident that, on balance, our values of liberty and democracy are superior to those of fundamentalist Muslims such as Osama bin Laden: But can we be wholly confident that our rulers are clear in their own minds where the demands of justice and national self-interest coincide-and where diverge?

The self-flagellation by critics post-911, who kept invoking the Crusades to show that Christianity was "just as bad as" radical Islam was appalling. Then again, I've been pro-Crusade since reading Knight of the Cross : a Story of the Crusades by Frederick Levi Coe when I was eleven. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2002 6:19 AM