Let's step back for a minute and remind ourselves just why we're here and just why a lot of hard men are standing the night watch for us in some dark and dangerous places.
1. We are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with radical Islam, which is an ideology not a religion.
2. The Islamofascist ideology seeks global domination and global theocracy. It has no other agenda than the destruction of western civilization. It cannot be negotiated with or appeased. Don't take my word for it, ask bin-Laden yourself. Islamic fundamentalism must be rooted out and destroyed.
2. Western Civilization is a uniquely valuable human development. As such it is worth fighting for. The multi-cultural propaganda not withstanding, it is Western Civilization that has been the key to such freedom, dignity,prosperity and progress as we have. Other cultures have become rich and free to the precise degree that they have adopted the key elements of Western Civilization: democracy, free markets, the rule of law and the scientific method.
Go ahead give a counter-example, I'll wait, and wait, and wait.
2 comments:
OK, that's easy. Ummm.
Ummm. A clue? Does it start with S? Err, no forget that. Bloody Soviets. Bloody Stalin.
Starts with C? No, forget that. Bloody Cambodian Croatian Czecks from the Congolese China Community.
Argentinians from Angola?
In the North? Nah, Korea. Iran? Syria? Iraq? A very small part of Vietnam?
Gee, this is tricky.
I know. Greenland. Maybe. When it thaws. Now that they've thrown off the yoke of supression from the Vikings and the Danes.
The minds of "conservatives" are truly novel, even precious things. Addicted to an extreme regime of "reductio ad absurdam", convinced that the particular historical dispensation that prevails this year, or this decade (or even this century) is proof enough of America's trans-historical ascendency and triumph, they hold forth on all manner of topics of which they know little and understand less.
Could it be that distance makes the mind grow sharper? That no longer having to live with the consequences of the Israelification and militarization of not only American foreign policy but also American political culture and even common sense, these worthies imagine that being so distant they may urge the moral troglodytes at the helm of this tragically misdirected republic forward to auto-toxemic oblivion with their usual antipodal abandon, remaining safe from any consequence?
If only the fact of this temporary hegemony of American arms meant something (even anything, much less what the oxygen-starved Mr Firmin imagines it means)! If only the precious (and astonishingly fragile) moral ascendency of "American ideals" (such as they are, yet won at great cost by true "hard men standing night watch") could survive not only the degradations of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, "rendition" (the practice of transporting suspects to countries where torture is legal), or, apparently, any prison in America, but also endure the abandonment of the Metropole by her staunchest defenders in favor of refuge in those distant parts of the globe carefully calculated by these scions of the right to be safe from the all-too-predictable "blowback".
But the problem is, it can't. While Mr. Firmin and his (relatively intelligent and sensible) ilk hide out in the Undowner, those of us with the courage and fortitude to inhabit the "land of the free and the home of the brave" must in addition endure the mendacity, stupidity, and downright foolishness of Mr Firmin's god-bothering comrades in arms on the Further Right, determined as they are to create the first and only true theocracy on this planet since the Kingdom of David. While Firmin and his kind skulk in the shadows these Holy Warriors deliver this nation unto the hands of her enemies (foreign and domestic) faster, and with greater efficiency than Newsweek, Mr Felt, Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, the ACLU, or Michael Moore would manage even if they had the faintest fucking idea of what they were doing to begin with.
It is sad indeed to see a fine mind and good heart as Mr Firmin once possessed (before he ascended to the rarified air of Cold Mountain) brough low by the cheap attractions of chauvinism, ahistoricism, and the most pathetic strains of jingoism seen on this planet since 1898.
May Cold Mountain be visited, and soon, by a bracing breath of air from some direction other than the sphincter of illogic and close-mindedness from which it currently inhales...
Post a Comment