What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.

Christianity teaches that this life is not the only life, and there is a final judgment in which all earthly accounts are settled.

Whenever the government is involved, there is an element of coercion.

I do believe that the Barack Obama administration has reached a new low by using the instruments of the state against its political adversaries. Obama does not see people who disagree with him as well-meaning opponents but rather as enemies. That's not something that Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton did as President. Probably Obama's direct descendant in this line is Richard Nixon. And Obama seems to have carried Nixonian tactics to a new low. So, we've turned a corner in American politics that doesn't bode well for our future.

In the Sixties, there was a big resistance to the Vietnam War. People began reinterpreting all American history as a series of misadventures and crimes and oppressions visited upon the innocent, the poor, the defenseless, the minorities, and so on. This created a new narrative in America. Let's call it, "America the inexcusable." And this narrative has been drummed into the minds of our young people. A whole generation of Americans has been taught that theirs is a bad country. And it's then very difficult for them to figure out how one can one be a good citizen in a bad country.

Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did.

What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.