Monday, May 21, 2007
Relearning with today's totalitarians what we should have known all along
Through the din of the cut and thrust of Washington politics at the moment — a necessary if destructive part of the democratic system — there is the necessity “to preserve your courage and your head” as Kipling said.
The eruption of worldwide terrorism in the name of Islam is a kind of fascism, an effort to turn back the clock to an earlier ideal of a perfect society which never existed; or as Aneurin Bevin said about European fascism of the 1930s, “[F]ascism is not in itself a new order of society; it is the future refusing to be born.”
As throughout its history, jihadist Islam will dissolve, eventually, in a bloodbath of ethnic and internecine rivalries [the preview is seen today in Iraq and on the streets of Karachi], if its opponents in the West maintain their ground [as they did at Tours and Vienna].
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Although millions, the vast majority, of Muslims want to live in peace and stability, men with weapons can intimidate that same majority as has been proved again and again throughout history [and, alas! in our own time in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union].
Any attempt, whether official or by freelance interlopers, to mitigate the ferocity of the nihilistic Islamoterrist attack on modern institutions in the West and elsewhere, through concessions and “politically correct” appeasement will only strengthen the resolve of the fanatics [as with the Nazis, the Communists — and Sadam’s Baathists between 1991 and 2001].
Morale and propaganda [as well as courage and training] are an essence of warfare today as they have been in the past and are impugned by those who “admit” the war against terrorism in Iraq has been lost.
Morale and propaganda may often decide the outcome of a conflict [as the Greeks who did not win against overwhelming odds at Thermopylae but paved the way for Athens’ victory at Salamis and Plataea turning back the Persian hordes forever].
Ethnic and racial profiling – otherwise known as identifying the enemy — is necessary if security is to be maintained inside the beleaguered open societies of the West and their allies elsewhere since the threat does not come from little old blue-haired ladies in wheelchairs.
Public opinion polls in countries where the average citizen fears public officials more than he welcomes their intervention in his daily life are obviously bogus and only reinforce the prejudices of their well-heeled instigator.
War is the most inefficient activity of man and has been since the first caveman hit the second caveman over the head with a club; World War II was a long series of mistaken assessments and brutal and bloody disasters, whether the Normandy landing, the Battle of the Bulge or Iwo Jima, but in the pursuit of victory, and only 20-20 hindsight gives us a narrative thread of unlimited success in pursuit of what was a noble cause.
The British Broadcasting Corporation is dedicated to anti-Americanism and has taken the democratic virtue of analysis and criticism to an infantile standard of pseudo-sophistication.
No major decision in the successful rebuilding of European society – morally as well as physically in the post-World War II — was taken with unanimous consent or even with a majority consensus and therefore the ferocity and ambiguities of the current debate is to be expected in the current horrendously difficult decisions over what to do against the terrorists.
Historical analogies are always misleading since the time, the conditions, the personalities which are the important incremental ingredients are always [and generally vastly] different; therefore, all insurgencies, in the nature of things, are specific to their time and place and so-called scientific counterinsurgency dogma is bogus beyond the bounds of common sense: the army should not steal the peasants’ chickens.
The Fallacy of Cleopatra’s Nose is indisputable: No, it is not true if Cleopatra had had an ugly flat nose instead of a Graeco-Egyptian proboscis, Antony would not have tarried, the Roman Republic would have thrived, the barbarian breakdown would not have brought on The Dark Ages, etc., etc.; one brick’s removal from a wall cannot decide its fate.
Nazi scientists who invented a new gas to kill Jews in the showers proved as the internet is proving today that technology is neutral – whether the longbow for the British victory at Agincourt or the internet as a recruiting device for today’s terrorists – a codicil is if “you” have it, “they” will be able to copy it or rent it so therefore never underestimate the time needed to develop a decisive weapon in your enemy’s hands.
Straight-line projections, whether economic or political, have always turned out to be wrong; the Chinese economic bubble is headed for an inevitable crash just as those prophets of 10-foot-tall Japanese were wrong two decades ago.
Neither India nor China will in the long run be able to ignore their majorities of impoverished countrymen in the rural areas; when the Bangalore riots erupted last year, 95 percent of the workers in the IT Golden Ghettos could not make it to work disrupting the whole world of Indian outsourcing.
Instantaneous digital communications, jet transport, and globalization, generally, is not an automatic solution to the world’s problems; for example, more than ever, the world is threatened by pandemics in no small part because Chinese Communist authorities lie or camouflage or are ignorant of outbreaks of disease in the world’s largest single population and refuse all-out collaboration with the international health institutions like WHO.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
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