The Achilles' Heel of the West
Achilles was invincible, so the story goes. He was strong and lightning fast, and in every battle he was undefeatable. But when he was shot with an arrow through the back of his heel, he was momentarily disabled, and that gave his enemies enough time to finish him off.
The West seems invincible too. We have superior technology and war-making know-how. We seem undefeatable. But we have a weakness. It is known in North America as "white guilt." In Europe it's called "post-colonial guilt."
But this guilt is founded on a mistake we should all easily see. The mistake is a simple overgeneralization (the enemy of us all). If we looked at it from another angle, most of us could clearly recognize the error.
If someone said, "All Muslims should die because of what they did to us on 9/11," almost everyone could see something wrong with the statement. Not all Muslims were involved in bringing down the Twin Towers. Some Muslims hadn't even been born yet. So it would be a moral wrong to punish all Muslims for what some Muslims did.
http://www.citizenwarrior.com/2011/03/achilles-heel-of-west.html
