Well, this is, first of all, racist. He doesn't want to use the Spanish term because he thinks it's "really not fair to saddle Spanish culture with the term." But it IS apparently fair to saddle Arabic culture with the term. Considering that Arabia was the birthplace of Algebra and underwent a renaissance that in large part made the European Renaissance possible, no, I don't think that's very fair at all.

But even if I let this racist term go through, what is Thar, exactly? A good deal of time is spent talking about how it isn't various things-- honor, bushido-- but it isn't ever defined. Instead I get this list of things that are associated with the "mentality," a list that, among other things, describes Tokugawa Japan perfectly. As a side note, anyone who thinks Japan's is a culture of Bushido does not know Japanese history. The Bushido code was written by a samurai who never saw combat, whose father never saw combat, and whose grandfather, in likelihood, never saw combat. The Bushido myth is a propaganda piece for convincing daimyos to keep their samurai on the payroll.

So we have a clearly racist document using a nonsense term to describe nothing. What, exactly, is this?