Western Civilization 101: Ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church - no mention or even concept of individual rights.
That takes care of the first 1400 years since the birth of Christ. Then came the Renaissance when Plato, Socrates and Aristotle were rediscovered and challenged the insanity, superstitious claptrap and mental sickness that was the Roman Catholic Church and opened the door to the likes of Luther. He was one of the first men to assert individual sovereignty and challenge papal authority. His most radical proclamation was that even one's concept of God was a personal realization.
He said: "The First Commandment is that you must not have other gods. That is, I must be your only God.
"Question: What does this saying mean? How should we understand it? What does it mean to have a god? What is God?
"Answer: To have a god means this: You expect to receive all good things from it and turn to it in every time of trouble. Yes, to have a god means to trust and to believe in Him with your whole heart. I have often said that only the trust and faith of the heart can make God or an idol. If your faith and trust are true you have the true God, too. On the other hand, where trust is false, is evil, there you will not have the true God either. Faith and God live together. I tell you, whatever you set your heart on and rely on is really your god.
Here, Luther proclaimed that only YOU, as an individual, can define your own god - not some stupid, venal, boy-molesting, corrupt Italian pope, not a priest or a bishop or cardinal selling "Indulgences" to ensure your safe passage to heaven after death - no, not anyone but you. God is whatever you have faith in. If you have faith in evil, then your god will be evil. If you have faith in goodness, then your god is goodness.
Then came Calvin and Knox who inspired Locke and Adam Smith and the others of the Scottish Enlightenment. Without Locke, there would be no Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison or Franklin. Without Locke, there would be no Burke to praise the American Revolution and condemn the French Revolution.
And the French Revolution needed to be condemned, not only for the Reign of Terror, but because of the totalitarian, atheistic and hubristic notions that gave rise to that Terror. The American Revolution did not inspire Marx. The French Revolution did. Marx was an idiotic believer in the "Romanticism" of Rousseau and Proudhomme. He was also a liar who fudged facts to suit his theory - in fact Marx was the Michael Moore of his time - he never let the truth get in the way of his misanthropism and mental illness.
From the French Revolution (which was the first "cult of death") we got the counter-Enlightenment and Marx and that great benefactor of mankind, Lenin, and the first blissful proletariat paradise, "Soviet Socialism." This was soon followed by that other wonderful utopia, "National Socialism" aka Nazism. The "collateral damage" of these totalitarian utopias was 56 million slaughtered. These were soon joined by the 120 million people murdered by various insane Asian communists.
From the French Revolution and Marx via all the wonderful European philosophers, like Bertie Russell, we got atheistic secular humanism and all those wonderful little European socialist utopias that would not be able to pay for their socialism if they stopped selling arms to Africa. (Huh? What about the great Nobel Prize? The money for that prize came from selling dynamite.) All of western Europe is socialist albeit not totalitarian. Eastern Europe is still struggling to cure itself of the Marxist disease. Africa is dying not so much of AIDS but of the disease of socialist-inspired "aid" and the Catholic Church with the help of the Jesuits brought the virus of Marxism to Latin America quite a while ago.
And, thanks to great Muslim philosophers such as Qutb, we now have Islamic Totalitarianism. Thousands of semi-educated half-wit ragheads have now been infected by sick and twisted western communists with the Marxist "cult of death." Ba'athism is simply Islamic National Socialism/Nazism. If you haven't realized this yet (Qutb admired the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin) then read Paul Berman's "Terror and Liberalism.")
Most of the Muslim terrorists are not (as "liberals" would like you to believe) poor and oppressed. Most come from middle-class families and have had a modicum of education - enough to have been infected with the unspoken Marxism buried in modern education. The latest British terrorists were born and raised in England and educated in government schools. They have absorbed Marxism by osmosis and feel angry and envious - the motivating forces behind Marx's own misanthropy as well as modern Marxists.
