Bill Maher Teaches Western Civ Right

It’s always worth noting whenever Bill Maher interrupts his normal pandering to his useful idiot audience for a few moments to lurch into logic and clear thought, something he does this 2-3 times each month.

On his show on Friday, he spent 6 minutes lecturing liberals about why they need to remember that all those old three-named white guys got a lot of things right. Below is the Youtube video and a transcript lovingly prepared by yours truly.

Enjoy.

Transcript:

And finally, new rule for all the progressives and academics who refer to Israel as an outpost of Western civilization like it's a bad thing. Please note Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every goddamn liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore. Individual liberty, scientific inquiry, rule of law, religious freedom, women's rights, human rights, democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech.

Please, somebody stop us before we enlighten again.

And since one can find all these concepts in today's Israel and virtually nowhere else in the Middle East, if anything, the world would be a better place if it had more Israels.

Of course, this message falls on deaf ears to the current crop, who reduce everything to being only victims or victimizers. So Israel is lumped in as the toxic fruit of the victimizing West. The irony being that all marginalized people live better today because of Western ideals, not in spite of them.

Martin Luther King used Henry David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience to help shape the civil rights movement.

The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes its core to Rousseau and Voltaire.

Cleisthenes never showed up for a sexual harassment seminar. But without him, there's no democracy.

The cop who murdered George Floyd got 21 years for violating his Fourth Amendment rights, an idea we got directly from John Locke, who no one in college would ever study any more because he's so old and so white and so dead. So Western. Yes.

That's how simple the woke are. It's never about ideas. If it was, would they be cheering on Hamas for their liberation? Liberation? To do what? More freely preside over a country where there are no laws against sexual harassment, spousal rape, domestic violence, homophobia, honor killings or child marriage.

This is who liberals think you should stand with. Women there should be so lucky as to get colonized by anybody else. And for the record, the Jews didn't colonize Israel or anywhere ever, except maybe Boca Raton.

Gaza wasn't seized by Israel like India or Kenya was by the British Empire, and the partitioning of the region wasn't decided by Jews, but by a vote of the United Nations in 1947, with everyone from Russia to Haiti voting for it. But apparently they don't teach this at drag queen story hour anymore.

Now, it is true that for too long we didn't study enough Asian or African or Latin American history. But part of the reason for that is, frankly, there's not as much to study. Colleges replaced courses in Western Civ but - [eye roll] ‘dead white men, am I right?’ - they replace that with world civilization classes, which is fine in theory. But what it meant in practice is you read queer poetry of the African Diaspora instead of Shakespeare. And I'm sure there's value in both.

But as usual, America only ever overcorrects And so we're at this place now where the words Western civ became kind of a shorthand for white people ruined everything.

But they didn't ruin everything. No, they didn't live up to their own ideals for far too long and committed atrocities. But people back then were all atrocious, not just the white ones, depending on who had the power, but it was the Western enlightenment that gave rise to the notion that the law of the jungle should be curbed. Henry David Thoreau. John Stuart Mill. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Three named Dudes.

It was all about three names you really didn't like that were the old guard Social Justice Warriors.

The ideas that came through Athens, Rome, London, Paris and yes, Philadelphia are what make life good for most people in free societies today. That the individuals have value and even the powers that be must submit to the rule of law, that punishment should not be cruel and unusual. The accused people get a trial, that there is such a thing as a war crime.

Why is it that every other culture gets a pass? But the West is exclusively the sum of the worst things its ever done?

You think only white people colonized? Historians estimate that the very non-Western Mr. Genghis Khan killed 40 million people, and that was in the 13th century. He single handedly may have reduced the world's population by 11%. On the other hand, he kind of made up for it because he was such a prolific colonizer of vaginas. But today, an estimated 16 million people are his direct descendants.

So, stop saying Western civilization like it's a contradiction in terms. It's not.

[End]