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Resilient Parasites
Peter Burnet, who blogs at brothersjudd.com, reacting to a hand-wringing op-ed in a British newspaper.How easy it is to forget what the world looked like exactly five years ago in August, 2001. A huge and contiguous swath of the globe from Lebanon through Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan was openly hostile to the West, crushing any kind of liberal dissent, spewing uncontrolled menacing rhetoric, boasting of terrifying weapons and fostering lethal, uncontrolled terrorist militias funded by limitless Saudi money. The UN and the entire Western transnational community wallowed with equanimity in a celebration of mau-mauing barbarity at Durban and spent long hours in workshops trying to fashion universal human rights out of the vilest anti-Semitic rhetoric this side of Julius Streicher. And then on September 11th, we all learned just where unchallenged and unchecked hate can lead and how morally obtuse the root cause crowd were. When President Bush promised a long war, most of us were still feeling the fears and emotional searings from 9/11.We told ourselves we were up to the challenge. For about a year, the left was mute and the self-abnegating moral relativism that had led us blindly to such danger was relegated to the fevered margins. But then the worst possible thing happened to undermine our resolve-early, dramatic success. Both Afghanistan and Iraq fell quickly, Syria retreated from Lebanon, the Saudis became hostile to terrorism, Pakistan was forced into a pro-Western, cooperative stance and domestic security thwarted any more of the terrorist attacks we all knew were unavoidable. Rather than rationing, war bond drives and the re-tooling of factories, the war years have been marked by an historic real estate boom, unprecedented personal consumption (and debt) and national angst over the saga of Brad and Jen. Few are left who really believe any of us but soldiers are at war in any but a remote, abstract sense. Bit by bit the fellow-travellers in the media and academia emerged from their hiding places and used these very successes to argue that the whole thing was unnecessary and unprincipled. For many, the defence of the world against madness has morphed into just another foreign adventure with no discernable connection to our future beyond the size of the national debt. We do not know whether Mr. Campbell has any clear notion of what he thinks might have happened had President Bush and Prime Minister Blair not drawn lines in the sand, but it seems pretty clear he has no fear of being asked. Mr. Campbell believes the enemy is fundamentalist thinking, which presumably he would define as the belief that any principle is worth fighting for. Of course, he fails to see his own frightening extremism. His is the voice of the fanatical mediator who is so determined to understand and validate opposing viewpoints, however vile, that he makes a point of proudly having no ideals of his own. The avoidance of conflict is not just his highest principle, its his only one, and as he knows of no others worth defending without compromise, he is open to allowing himself to be convinced barbarity is just an alternative life style and civilization is conquering oppression. Such fools have guided the West intellectually for close to a hundred years now and several times we have had to wrench control of the zeitgeist from them to confront menacing catastrophes looming right before our eyes. As they seem to be such resilient parasites, some days it is hard not to regret weve been so good at it up until now. Posted by: Mike 2006-08-20 |
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