"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid" - General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"GREAT SPIRITS HAVE ALWAYS ENCOUNTERED
VIOLENT OPPOSITION FROM MEDIOCRE MINDS" - Einstein
VIOLENT OPPOSITION FROM MEDIOCRE MINDS" - Einstein
"It's high time mediocre minds encountered violent opposition from great spirits." - jillosophy
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This is an excerpt from an article that is so spot-on, so clear and objective, so rational and logical and true - that everyone should read it... and I really wish our Government would. It points out the faults and weaknesses of our present collective state of mind and how suicidal it is. How false and impractical it is. And how at odds it is in this day and age with survival.
Please read and pass on.
The article in it's entirety can be found here:
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This article is from TOS Vol. 1' No. 4. The full contents of the issue are listed here.
"No Substitute for Victory" The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism
John Lewis
Author's note: This article was adapted from a lecture I presented at the Ayn Rand Institute’s OCON conference "The Jihad Against the West," in Boston, MA, on October 21, 2006.
"No Substitute for Victory" The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism
John Lewis
Author's note: This article was adapted from a lecture I presented at the Ayn Rand Institute’s OCON conference "The Jihad Against the West," in Boston, MA, on October 21, 2006.
**
On December 7, 1941, we were attacked by Japan, a country then governed by a militaristic, religious ideology, in pursuit of a divine empire, with indoctrinated soldiers who soon used suicide tactics. We chose the ruthless, offensive response. Three years and eight months later, the Japanese surrendered, their country in ruins, their people starving. Five years after the attacks, Japan had a constitution that included the following (from its famous Article 9): "[T]he Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation. . . . The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”
Sixty years after the U.S. ended two generations of aggressive Japanese warfare, Japan remains free, productive, and friendly to America. The Japanese have not abandoned their traditions - nor has anyone asked them to do so - but they no longer use them to kill and enslave others. Rather than seek our destruction, Japan has become a staunch political ally, a robust free-market competitor, and an invaluable economic producer. Rather than build bombs and fighter planes with which to attack us, the Japanese build cars and computers that contribute immensely to our own high standard of living.
In perfect contrast, the second option - the pragmatic, altruistic, limited-military response - has been the basic approach of the Bush Administration to the attacks of September 11, 2001. What are the results?
Afghanistan continues to be strafed by holy warriors trained in Pakistan - a nuclear-armed dictatorship that we have placed off-limits to our own forces. Iraq's insurgency continues, with Shiite militias, no longer restrained either by Saddam Hussein or by us, growing to fill the political vacuum. Iran is emboldened, its fundamentalist leadership ever more vocal, its program of nuclear development open and expanding. Saudi Arabia - our alleged ally - funds religious schools that teach hatred of the West and train an endless stream of jihadists. We pay two-billion dollars a year in tribute to Egypt, so that they will refrain from attacking Israel. Sudan engages in genocide under theocratic rule, while Somalia, Nigeria, and other countries are following suit, their tribal clerics doling out Islamic law under trees. Syria - a second-generation thugocracy on the verge of collapse a few years ago - has been resurrected and emboldened. Hezbollah has taken over Southern Lebanon. The Gaza is a new terror enclave under the democratically elected terror-cult Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is winning elections in Egypt. Other anti-Western militant groups are winning elections and subverting Western values from Spain to Indonesia. Across the world - including Canada, England, and the U.S. - Muslim cells plot more attacks and plan political takeovers, all the while hiding behind constitutional protections that they have sworn to destroy. Anyone daring to renounce or criticize Islam may have to live forever underground, in fear of murder sanctioned by religious decree.
Five years to the month after 9/11, and in stark contrast to the situation in Japan five years after Pearl Harbor, an Islamic cleric, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, a teacher at an Islamic school in Java, and a killer in the Bali bombing of 2002 who was released from prison in June 2006, now openly promotes a new constitution for Indonesia:
"We demand an Islamic state, and not some form of Islamisation of society. We want the state to be Islamic, with Islamic leaders who have the courage and will to implement the Islamic law in total. . . .
We want an Islamic state where Islamic law is not just in the books but enforced, and enforced with determination. There is no space and no room for democratic consultation. The Islamic law is set and fixed, so why discuss it? Just implement it!
Right now we are drafting our own constitutional amendments for Indonesia, the framework for an Indonesian Islamic state where Islamic laws are enforced. Indonesians must understand that there is no Islamic state without the enforcement of Islamic laws."8
This is Islamic Totalitarianism - State Islam - rule by Islamic Law - and it is on the rise. While this cleric plots an Islamic State, people from countries where children are taught that Jews are born of pigs and monkeys, and that Israel is "occupied territory" and fair game for attack, rail against so-called anti-Muslim "prejudice." Inside America, leaders of hostile countries give speeches to build "bridges of understanding" while building nuclear bombs overseas.9 Adherents of Islam claim to be victims of persecution, assertions they make on national television, from pulpits, and in tenured university positions.
Meanwhile, a state of siege is being more deeply entrenched inside America every day. We are losing the war by institutionalizing the loss of our freedoms, searching the sneakers of senior citizens in wheelchairs in order to avoid confronting bellicose dictatorships overseas. In the minds of many people, the Bush administration’s allegedly "offensive" strategy has discredited the very idea of genuinely offensive war for American self-interest, which it pledged to fight, and then betrayed to its core. Our soldiers come home maimed or dead, and military offense, rather than timidity, takes the blame. To compensate for our weakness overseas, we are building electric fences and security barriers to keep the world out, accepting the medieval ideal of walled towns under constant threat of attack, rather than destroying the source of such threats.
In short, the second, pragmatic, altruistic approach has failed. In the five years since 9/11, the motivations behind the Islamic attacks have not been suppressed - and this is the real failure of these policies. The number of particular attacks is not the measure of success or failure. The Islamic Totalitarians remain physically intact, spiritually committed, and politically empowered. The Islamic Totalitarian movement remains - distributed, without the strong central command Al Qaeda once had, but still energized - and it appears like hidden gushers, the jihad bursting forth in seemingly random places by internal pressure from an underground stream. Our acceptance of pragmatism, the policy of short-range trial and error that rejects principles on principle - and altruism, the morality of self-sacrifice - left no other result possible.
The reason for this failure is that every one of the ideas we used to evaluate our options is wrong. In every case, the opposite of today’s "conventional wisdom" is true.
A strong offense does not create new enemies; it defeats existing foes. Were this not so, we would be fighting German and Japanese suicide bombers today, while North Korea - undefeated by America - would be peaceful, prosperous, and free.
Poverty is not the "root cause" of wars. If it were, poor Mexicans would be attacking America, not begging for jobs at Wal-Mart.
Democracy is not a route to freedom - not for the Greeks who voted to kill Socrates, nor for the Romans who acclaimed Caesar, nor for the Germans who elected Hitler.
A culture of slavery and suicide is not equal to a culture of freedom and prosperity - not for those who value life.
The world is not a flux of contradictions, in which principles do not work. If it were, gravity would not hold, vaccinations would not work, and one would not have a right to one’s life.
Being moral does not mean sacrificing for others. It means accepting the American principle of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - and living for one’s own sake.
History is clear: All-out force against fanatical killers is both practical and moral. It led us to our two most important foreign policy successes - the defeats of Germany and Japan in 1945 - and to the permanent peace with those nations that we take for granted today. Such a course was practical and moral then, and it is practical and moral now - an affirmation, and a defense, of life and civilization.
Rights-respecting people, those who do not initiate force against others, have a right to defend themselves for their own sakes—because they have a right to live. To do this, they must approach their enemies in a principled, self-interested way. Ayn Rand, in her essay on the nature of government, observed a vital relationship between man’s right to life and his right to self-defense:
"The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
If some "pacifist" society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it."10
These words ring especially true in the war against Islamic Totalitarianism. The consequence of our failure to respond forthrightly to these attacks has been precisely to encourage and reward this movement. We have granted it a safe haven, allowed it to claim victory through continued existence, appealed to its apologists who spread anti-American venom, and emboldened those who wish to take up the fight against us. The solution is to renounce altruistic appeasement and pragmatic compromise, to recognize our own value, and to defend our lives by right. We must defeat these enemies, and we can.
Only after we understand that we should defeat these enemies, can we ask how. This point is vital, for the question of moral rightness is logically and psychologically prior to any question of strategy or tactics. If we do not understand that we should defeat them - if we think that we are as bad as they are, or that they have legitimate grievances that justify their attacks, or that we have created a situation that morally demands that we compensate them - then our lack of moral self-confidence will undercut our motivation to fight. But the facts do not warrant such a conclusion. We are morally right and the Islamic Totalitarians are evil - not merely in their methods, but, more fundamentally, in their values and goals. We have a moral responsibility to defeat them - if we want to live. We can and must approach this war with the moral self-confidence of those fighting for civilization itself - for the basic conditions on which human life depends - because that is precisely what is at stake.
Sixty years after the U.S. ended two generations of aggressive Japanese warfare, Japan remains free, productive, and friendly to America. The Japanese have not abandoned their traditions - nor has anyone asked them to do so - but they no longer use them to kill and enslave others. Rather than seek our destruction, Japan has become a staunch political ally, a robust free-market competitor, and an invaluable economic producer. Rather than build bombs and fighter planes with which to attack us, the Japanese build cars and computers that contribute immensely to our own high standard of living.
In perfect contrast, the second option - the pragmatic, altruistic, limited-military response - has been the basic approach of the Bush Administration to the attacks of September 11, 2001. What are the results?
Afghanistan continues to be strafed by holy warriors trained in Pakistan - a nuclear-armed dictatorship that we have placed off-limits to our own forces. Iraq's insurgency continues, with Shiite militias, no longer restrained either by Saddam Hussein or by us, growing to fill the political vacuum. Iran is emboldened, its fundamentalist leadership ever more vocal, its program of nuclear development open and expanding. Saudi Arabia - our alleged ally - funds religious schools that teach hatred of the West and train an endless stream of jihadists. We pay two-billion dollars a year in tribute to Egypt, so that they will refrain from attacking Israel. Sudan engages in genocide under theocratic rule, while Somalia, Nigeria, and other countries are following suit, their tribal clerics doling out Islamic law under trees. Syria - a second-generation thugocracy on the verge of collapse a few years ago - has been resurrected and emboldened. Hezbollah has taken over Southern Lebanon. The Gaza is a new terror enclave under the democratically elected terror-cult Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is winning elections in Egypt. Other anti-Western militant groups are winning elections and subverting Western values from Spain to Indonesia. Across the world - including Canada, England, and the U.S. - Muslim cells plot more attacks and plan political takeovers, all the while hiding behind constitutional protections that they have sworn to destroy. Anyone daring to renounce or criticize Islam may have to live forever underground, in fear of murder sanctioned by religious decree.
Five years to the month after 9/11, and in stark contrast to the situation in Japan five years after Pearl Harbor, an Islamic cleric, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, a teacher at an Islamic school in Java, and a killer in the Bali bombing of 2002 who was released from prison in June 2006, now openly promotes a new constitution for Indonesia:
"We demand an Islamic state, and not some form of Islamisation of society. We want the state to be Islamic, with Islamic leaders who have the courage and will to implement the Islamic law in total. . . .
We want an Islamic state where Islamic law is not just in the books but enforced, and enforced with determination. There is no space and no room for democratic consultation. The Islamic law is set and fixed, so why discuss it? Just implement it!
Right now we are drafting our own constitutional amendments for Indonesia, the framework for an Indonesian Islamic state where Islamic laws are enforced. Indonesians must understand that there is no Islamic state without the enforcement of Islamic laws."8
This is Islamic Totalitarianism - State Islam - rule by Islamic Law - and it is on the rise. While this cleric plots an Islamic State, people from countries where children are taught that Jews are born of pigs and monkeys, and that Israel is "occupied territory" and fair game for attack, rail against so-called anti-Muslim "prejudice." Inside America, leaders of hostile countries give speeches to build "bridges of understanding" while building nuclear bombs overseas.9 Adherents of Islam claim to be victims of persecution, assertions they make on national television, from pulpits, and in tenured university positions.
Meanwhile, a state of siege is being more deeply entrenched inside America every day. We are losing the war by institutionalizing the loss of our freedoms, searching the sneakers of senior citizens in wheelchairs in order to avoid confronting bellicose dictatorships overseas. In the minds of many people, the Bush administration’s allegedly "offensive" strategy has discredited the very idea of genuinely offensive war for American self-interest, which it pledged to fight, and then betrayed to its core. Our soldiers come home maimed or dead, and military offense, rather than timidity, takes the blame. To compensate for our weakness overseas, we are building electric fences and security barriers to keep the world out, accepting the medieval ideal of walled towns under constant threat of attack, rather than destroying the source of such threats.
In short, the second, pragmatic, altruistic approach has failed. In the five years since 9/11, the motivations behind the Islamic attacks have not been suppressed - and this is the real failure of these policies. The number of particular attacks is not the measure of success or failure. The Islamic Totalitarians remain physically intact, spiritually committed, and politically empowered. The Islamic Totalitarian movement remains - distributed, without the strong central command Al Qaeda once had, but still energized - and it appears like hidden gushers, the jihad bursting forth in seemingly random places by internal pressure from an underground stream. Our acceptance of pragmatism, the policy of short-range trial and error that rejects principles on principle - and altruism, the morality of self-sacrifice - left no other result possible.
The reason for this failure is that every one of the ideas we used to evaluate our options is wrong. In every case, the opposite of today’s "conventional wisdom" is true.
A strong offense does not create new enemies; it defeats existing foes. Were this not so, we would be fighting German and Japanese suicide bombers today, while North Korea - undefeated by America - would be peaceful, prosperous, and free.
Poverty is not the "root cause" of wars. If it were, poor Mexicans would be attacking America, not begging for jobs at Wal-Mart.
Democracy is not a route to freedom - not for the Greeks who voted to kill Socrates, nor for the Romans who acclaimed Caesar, nor for the Germans who elected Hitler.
A culture of slavery and suicide is not equal to a culture of freedom and prosperity - not for those who value life.
The world is not a flux of contradictions, in which principles do not work. If it were, gravity would not hold, vaccinations would not work, and one would not have a right to one’s life.
Being moral does not mean sacrificing for others. It means accepting the American principle of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - and living for one’s own sake.
History is clear: All-out force against fanatical killers is both practical and moral. It led us to our two most important foreign policy successes - the defeats of Germany and Japan in 1945 - and to the permanent peace with those nations that we take for granted today. Such a course was practical and moral then, and it is practical and moral now - an affirmation, and a defense, of life and civilization.
Rights-respecting people, those who do not initiate force against others, have a right to defend themselves for their own sakes—because they have a right to live. To do this, they must approach their enemies in a principled, self-interested way. Ayn Rand, in her essay on the nature of government, observed a vital relationship between man’s right to life and his right to self-defense:
"The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
If some "pacifist" society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it."10
These words ring especially true in the war against Islamic Totalitarianism. The consequence of our failure to respond forthrightly to these attacks has been precisely to encourage and reward this movement. We have granted it a safe haven, allowed it to claim victory through continued existence, appealed to its apologists who spread anti-American venom, and emboldened those who wish to take up the fight against us. The solution is to renounce altruistic appeasement and pragmatic compromise, to recognize our own value, and to defend our lives by right. We must defeat these enemies, and we can.
Only after we understand that we should defeat these enemies, can we ask how. This point is vital, for the question of moral rightness is logically and psychologically prior to any question of strategy or tactics. If we do not understand that we should defeat them - if we think that we are as bad as they are, or that they have legitimate grievances that justify their attacks, or that we have created a situation that morally demands that we compensate them - then our lack of moral self-confidence will undercut our motivation to fight. But the facts do not warrant such a conclusion. We are morally right and the Islamic Totalitarians are evil - not merely in their methods, but, more fundamentally, in their values and goals. We have a moral responsibility to defeat them - if we want to live. We can and must approach this war with the moral self-confidence of those fighting for civilization itself - for the basic conditions on which human life depends - because that is precisely what is at stake.
**
Read it all here:
posted by jillosophy at 1/12/2007 11:52:00 AM
1 Comments:
Don't know if you are aware of some clarifications posted by John Lewis at Jihadwatch.org earlier this week.
Dr. John Lewis of Ashland University is the author of this superb, must-read piece. Here, he kindly offers some clarifications to those who sent him questions after reading it:
Regarding my article “No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism” in The Objective Standard, readers have brought up several questions that must be confronted. Among them: (1) how can religion and state be separated in Islam, since Islam is a social / political / legal system as much as a religion, and (2) isn't the enemy stateless, i.e., without the centralized political state as controlled Japan?
I will address such issues in the next Objective Standard, in a reply to readers' comments. Here is a short answer.
The power of a policy that defines the goals of the war as eliminating State Islam is that it defines the threat precisely: those who use force to impose Islam politically. It states exactly what we want from the enemy: an end to his use of force. It has a successful historical precedent, and it is fully consistent with the requirements of freedom. It leads directly to a clear strategy to achieve the policy.
This definition implies several things. First off, since the elimination of the threat is the goal -- and not a better way of life for foreign populations -- then we could have installed a ruler over Iraq, akin to the Shah in Iran, and told him to do what is needed to control the violence -- but never, ever, to attack America, or threaten American interests. We are in a mess in Iraq because we took on the task of bringing freedom and prosperity to them -- which never should have been our goal. Altruism led us into such a sacrifice. If we remove an enemy, and the country falls into civil war, that is better than their building nuclear bombs.
Second, since political Islam would be the target, meaning first and foremost wherever Islam has achieved actual political power, then Iran would be first -- with the goal of eliminating the theocratic government, installing an America-friendly ruler, and then confronting the Saudis. We would never have ended Iran's strongest regional opponent (Saddam Hussein) and tried to free his country without dealing first with the main threat next door.
Third, had we stated these goals openly, the way would be clear for other governments to clean house. They’d be less inclined to compromise between Islamic Totalitarians and us, since they’d want to avoid our wrath at all costs. We should never allow ourselves to be seen as equal to them, not morally, not politically, and not militarily. The demonstration of resolve in war is very important, whether Sherman's burning of Atlanta (which collapsed the southern will to fight) or the atomic bombs in Japan (which made it clear to the Japanese leadership that we had, and would use, them).
To answer another persistent point, we do not, in my opinion, need nuclear weapons in the Middle East (although I am not a military tactician). But we do need to demonstrate the will to remove such a government because it is a threat, without apologizing every time a civilian is hurt. This demonstration would sweep across borders, to be seen by every government in the world, thus transcending the stateless nature of Islam, and eliminating any equality between supporting us and the Islamists.
Islam itself is stateless, meaning that it respects no borders. It was designed precisely to rise above ethnic / tribal / clan groups, to unite all those who submit to Allah. We have to adopt the same attitude, only with freedom and individual rights as our central ideals. By defining the enemy as Islamic Totalitarianism -- meaning, government imposition of Islamic Law -- we exempt no such state from our reach, and yet allow every state a chance to avoid the title and our action.
As to the claim that Islam, practiced literally, cannot be separated from politics, this is true, by the evidence I know -- I see Islam as descending from common roots with Zoroastrianism, the ideology of Ahuramazda, and Manichaeism in the Near East. I wrote a short piece on this, “Notes on the Near Eastern Legacy of Islam,” here, dated May 27, 2006, and others have done a better and more comprehensive job:
Islam is a way of life, not a religion as distinguished from state. But it is not true that Muslims cannot live under non-Muslim laws; the majority in western countries do. If they are compromising their religion, then so be it. Setting the enemy as Islamic Totalitarianism would allow us to end attempts to import Islamic Law into our own country, and to empower our allies to end it themselves in their own countries. It would allow individual Muslims to comply, and would reveal those who refuse. It would also demonstrate the failure of Islam as a political movement, and thus challenge the premise, in the minds of many, that the Islamic Totalitarians are some kind of misguided idealists, right in principle but taken to extremes.
As to the issue of realism: there can be no realistic discussion of a proper “strategy” (a means to attain policy ends) without proper definition of the end that the strategy is intended to achieve. There is nothing more un-realistic than to try to create a plan without knowing where we are going -- or to assume that no plan is possible, since reality is “really” always in flux. The realism that we need is the recognition that those supporting Political Islam -- meaning, not a type of Islam, but rather Islam considered with respect to its political characteristics -- are the real enemy. I'll gladly listen to someone who has a different strategy for eliminating Islam as a political power all the while ending the threat to us -- but I’ve not yet heard it.
In the long run, however, this is an intellectual battle. My stress on integrity means that we must understand the issues, and talk the talk as well as walking the walk. We have not properly stated our own goodness, and why we have a right to defend ourselves. It is the job of the intellectuals to state and defend these truths philosophically. If we do not present an alternative to the Qu’ran, and are unwilling to destroy those building nuclear bombs in order to impose it, then why should anyone re-write it? This may take five generations -- but it will never happen if the political success of Islamic Totalitarianism is allowed to continue.
AnonYmouse
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