David Warren writes something about the recently released Fox News journalists that is harsh, but needs to be said:

[T]he large is often most visible in the small.

The degree to which our starch is awash is exhibited in the behaviour of so many of our captives, but especially in these two. They were told to convert to Islam under implicit threat (blindfolded and hand-tied, they could not judge what threat), and agreed to make the propaganda broadcasts to guarantee their own safety. That much we can understand, as conventional cowardice. (Understand; not forgive.) But it is obvious from their later statements that they never thought twice; that they could see nothing wrong in serving the enemy, so long as it meant they’d be safe.

I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths. Christianity still lives, because of such martyrs. Not suicide bombers: but truly defenceless martyrs.

You don’t necessarily have to be a Christian, to be Western. Two years ago, an heroic Italian captive, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, asked to make whimpering statements as part of the video of his execution in Iraq, ripped at his hood and instead declared, “This is how an Italian dies!” to his contemptible captors. He must have upset them: for they shot him instead of sawing off his head. In making his stand for human dignity, he also turned one of their propaganda videos, into one of ours.

But Quattrocchi had three friends, who all successfully begged for their lives. And the two Fox journalists, whom I will not stoop to name, begged for their lives even though, in retrospect, their lives probably weren’t in danger.

Why did Fatah bother to make the video? Didn’t they realize conversion under duress means nothing? That no one, East or West, would take it at face value?

They didn’t make it for face value. They made it to show the whole Muslim world, via satellite television, what wimps these Westerners are. That they’ll do anything at all to save their lives, that they don’t think twice about it. That is the substance of most Islamo-fascist propaganda: that the West consists of straw men, of men without chests, of men easily pushed over.

There are many causes to this degraded situation, but the most important one is the rise of materialism, the heretical belief that the material world, what we can see and measure and feel with our senses, is all that there is. No heaven. No God. No soul.

If you believe that, then there is no higher value than saving one’s skin and maximizing one’s pleasures. We see this on the political left, but we see it on the right as well. For the left, the manifestations are obvious: we need to prolong life at all costs, even at the expense of the lives of the unborn. We must create heaven on earth because this is all we have. If we consider the matter, we also see this tendency on the right, such as in the belief of an absolutist notion of economic freedom that makes no provision for the poor or in the endorsement of any injustice so long as it is aimed at the enemy in war time. The notion that justice might require us to risk lives and treasure to protect noncombatants (even those of another civilization) is dismissed as so much drivel.

And if you are a materialist that doesn’t believe in God and Jesus and Divine Justice, I suppose that’s a reasonable standpoint. It is, after all, the end point of the high pagan morality of Ancient Rome; unlike Christian civilization, it did not expand the orbit of moral responsibility to strangers and even one’s enemies. Christianity releases us from the closed circle of materialism and, at the same time, provides supernatural guidance and strength so that men like St. Sebastian, St. Valentine, and St. Maximillian Kolbe, and women like St. Philomena, could go to their deaths even in the face of tortures and certain death rather than endorse a lie. I have been blessed without having to face this kind of trial. But I hope if I do I won’t give up my dignity and deny the Faith of my Fathers.