Questions about the defense of the West

This blog is a call for the defense of the West. However, in order for this call to be a coherent one, several questions must be answered. I will try to address them in subsequent posts. The answers will be considered to be a work in progress, and may be changed, if circumstances warrant.
These questions include:

What is the West?
Why must the West be defended? - what are the threats to the West?
Why must the West be defended? - why defend the West at all?
How should the West be defended?
Is it possible to declare victory in the defense of the West, and under what conditions would Defenders do so?

Other questions will be explored, as they emerge...

DotW honors Charles Martel

This blog honors Charles Martel, a true Defender of the West.

His entry on Wikipedia describes Charles this way:

Martel (Martel means "the Hammer") is best remembered for winning the Battle of Tours in 732, which has been characterized as the salvation of Europe from the Arabs spreading their empire further than the Iberian Peninsula. Martel's Frankish army defeated an Arab army, which had swept through southern Asia and north Africa, before conquering most of the Iberian peninsula and much of southern France. Only once in history did infantry without bows and arrows or firearms withstand mounted and armoured cavalry. Martel achieved lasting greatness by inspiring his Franks to do what was thought to be impossible...
He stood literally in the path of empire, and halted it.

Charles Martel - born August 23, 686 - died October 22, 741.
A true Defender of the West.

An Excerpt from "Suicial Tendencies in the West"

Bruce Thornton has an excellent essay on Victor Davis Hanson's website.
The piece concludes with the following:
(Defenders are encouraged to follow the hyperlinks I have added below, in order to learn more about Defenders of the past.)

In short, like the hand wringing of the administration over an obvious lie only the irrational and ignorant would believe [Newsweek's Toiletgate], this willingness to demonize the culture that created you and to extol as superior the culture that wants to destroy you can only be described as suicidal. Certainly the Islamist sees it that way, which is why he feels confident in predicting the ultimate triumph of his religion: he is willing to die and kill for his beliefs, whereas significant numbers of Westerners don't really believe that there is anything worth dying and killing for.

Increasingly we Westerners resemble the Eloi of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, beautiful, gentle, highly civilized hedonists whose fate is to be devoured raw by the brutal Morlocks. We are the beneficiaries of a culture created by those before us who forged European civilization in the fires of resistance to Islamic jihad: in Spain, in Sicily, in Eastern Europe, in Greece — the plunder, rape, slaughter, massacres, sacks, kidnapping, and enslavement perpetrated by the armies of Allah were for centuries fought by those whose names now most Westerners have forgotten or would be embarrassed to claim as their own. Don John, Charles Martel, Leo the Isaurian, Prince Eugene, Montecuccoli, Andrea Doria, El Cid, Sobieski, Charlemagne, Suvorov, Boucicaut, Hunyadi, Fernando II of Castile, Alfonso I of Aragon, Guiscard, Harold Hardrada - who among us knows anything about the men who fought and killed so that Europe, and Europe's offspring America, today looks like Europe and America instead of looking like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Syria?

Because of the brutal violence of those warriors against jihad, we in the West today enjoy the luxury of cynicism, cheap irony, effete tolerance, and hedonism. We moral dwarves stand on the shoulders of those giants and spit on their heads, thinking our ingratitude is really an intellectual sophistication superior to the primitive superstitions and naïve ideals that have made our lives of freedom and prosperity possible. Meanwhile jihad by other means — demography, immigration, terrorism, the oil weapon — continues apace, at least until the time when a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon falls into the hands of a modern jihadist and we are returned to the sort of slaughter our ancestors suffered for centuries. Maybe then we'll wake up.

First Post

First Post to Defender of the West.