"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
-- Nayland Smith to Dr. Petrie,
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu,
Chapter 2
Kids, assuming they still read, probably aren't exposed to the works of Sax Rohmer anymore. Fu Manchu would be terribly un-PC today, positively racist, in fact. Yet Nayland Smith's description of the Insidious Doctor would fit with little change someone else we know, who is decidedly not a character of fiction.Fu Manchu appeared in at least a dozen novels and probably twice that many short stories. His organization, the Si Fan, was made up of fanatical orientals, pigtailed Chinamen willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater glory of Fu. Their enemy, the West, was responsible for the usual assortment of dreary offenses, all of which required Dire Revenge™. The difference between Fu Manchu and his competitors was that Rohmer was a good enough writer to endow his creation with a few good traits to go with his lust for power and the low price -- well under a dollar, even adjusted for inflation -- he put on human life.
By the time the world had gone through the real horrors of the Second World War Rohmer was old and gray and eventually -- in 1959 --dead. The Doctor and his competitors were by then hopelessly comic-bookish, not to be taken at all seriously. SS divisions were a much more frightening -- and more demonstrably evil -- proposition than Si Fan was, and the prospect of nuclear anihilation made the Nazis look amateurish. Similarly cartoonish villains, for instance James Bond's nemesis SPECTRE, dwelt in the realm of fiction and never ventured out. No one really took them seriously. Those who believed in secret societies, sinister international conspiracies, and wheels within wheels were dismissed as crackpots and banished to Bilderberg.
Rohmer, it turns out, is the one who got it right. In fact, it is possible to build an international organization devoted to World Domination™, staffed by masked fanatics who're ready to sacrifice themselves in the name of... ummm... whatever it is.
In the present instance, "whatever it is" turns out to be Islam, whether in the Sunni version pushed by al-Qaeda and its allies, or the Shia flavor they go for in Iran and Hezbollahstan, but it could just as easily be something else. Sri Lanka has a tiny Muslim minority that's uninvolved in their civil war, but the Tamil Tigers invented the boomer.We're suddenly confronted with real-life versions of people who in 1999 were regarded in the same light as Lex Luthor or the Council of Boskone. The shadowy international financiers are there, just where in any half-decent pulp novel we would expect them, moving large sums of money through hidden channels. The Masters of War™ who make big money selling arms are in evidence, though they don't usually make the headlines. There are secret passwords and kabalistic signs, and those suspected of spying are bumped off painfully and without scruple. There are potentates and grand viziers of one sort or another, rubbing their hands as they ponder the advancement of complicated schemes. Occasionally we even find a perky blonde in peril and a cleft-chinned hero trying to get her out. And of course there's the signature of the Fu Manchu approach, the fanatical myrmidon, who blows himself up with distressing regularity.
The question from the first has been how the rational, non-comic book world handles the very real depredations of a world populated by people who favor capes, robes, masks, funny hats, and multiple aliases. The answer has been disappointing from societies that claim to treasure thinking "outside the box":
- Denial: There is no al-Qaeda. There is no vast international conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of the West. The very idea's a hoax, ridiculous on its face, probably perpetrated by Karl Rove.
Suprrisingly enough, this idea's pretty current among those who always expect the worst from the U.S. in particular and the West in general. The tell-tale for this attitude is someone who "questions the timing" of a major bust or the details of a plot coming out.
- Send in the Police: Terrorist attacks are crimes under criminal law. The proper response is to issue arrest warrants through Interpol, have the perps arrested, and brought before the International Criminal Court.
This is the legalist train of thought. It's prevalent in Europe and Britan, where the police are actually chasing down and arresting people who blow up trainloads of people or drive flaming cars into airports. While this works to an extent, there is the fact that jail sentences run short there, and the perps will be out in five or six years to continue what they were doing, their debt to society paid.
The thought of Pakistain acting on an Interpol warrant, sending the cops to Chitral, and arresting and deporting bin Laden is pretty laughable. Ditto the thought of them knocking on the door of Mullah Omar's plausibly denied house in downtown Quetta. We won't even mention Dawood Ibrahim, for whom India still patiently waits.
This train of thought also doesn't consider governmental organizations like the IRGC, which are busily engaged in the terrorism business, or the government of Syria. Before you can bring them to Nuremburg you've got to catch them. To date, they've had something to say about that.
- There is an al-Qaeda, but it's not a threat: There hasn't been an attack since 2001. That was six years ago. Therefore there won't be another one. The threat is way overblown. There's more chance of being abducted by aliens than there is of being killed in a terrorist attack.
This line is first cousin to the denial line, and will occasionally be echoed by the same people, sometimes in the same sentence. We never said logic was a requirement for an opinion, did we?
The approximately 2,974 people killed on 9-11-01 were a tiny fraction of a smidgeon of one percent of the U.S. population. But it seemed like there were a lot of them at the time.
- It's all Our Fault: There is an al-Qaeda, but its attacks were justified in response to our own arrogant and misguided policies. We deserve to lose. The world will be better off without Western Civilization.
This is the Noam Chomsky-Howard Zinn-Arundati Roy line of thinking. There are no superior cultures, there is no better way of life. Since all cultures are alike, and since the U.S. and the West have demonstrated sufficiently that while there are no superior cultures there are inferior cultures, too mired in greed and ulterior motives to be of any worth, it's fine that they're dragged under by the weight of history, to join the Hittites and the Gepids and Mohenjo Daro on the list of historical also-rans.
Of course, if the Islamists ever do win, they'll chop the heads off Chomsky, Zinn, and Roy.
- Politix as Usual: There is an enemy, we are in a war, but the threat of societal oblivion is just another political talking point, of the same weight as social security reform, the highway trust fund, or pork for Boston.
We've got most of an entire political party that adheres to this line. Votes are what counts. Probably those pushing the line have no conception that the West could possibly lose the war on terror. Their intellectual horizon doesn't extend that far out -- it, in fact, goes no further than the next election. Probably some few are simply too stoopid to realize that if Western society is replaced by the caliphate there won't be any social security to reform. Either that, or they expect to be on the shura, doing business at the same old stand while wearing a new turban, come the new order.
- Compromise: There is an enemy, we are in a war, but the way to get out of war, which is bad by definition, is to hold endless series of talks, addressing the enemy's concerns and making tradeoffs until both parties are happy. Then hostilities will end.
Every once in awhile we hear an academic talking about this. It's a purely theoretical position and it always has been. If the enemy's position is submit or die, where's the room for compromise?
- Don't Hurt Anybody: There is an enemy, we are in a war, but taking strong measures against that enemy makes us "just like them." We have to avoid killing anyone who's not in the process of shooting at our guys. This attitude is a reflection of the basic good-heartedness of the West. In a refutation of the charges of Chomsky-Zinn-Roy, we really don't want to kill any innocents. We're willing to stretch the point and not even kill any sympathizers.
Confining the carnage only to shootouts allows the Masterminds™ to get away -- I can't recall reading about Dr. Fu Manchu ever whipping out a rod. The fastidious aversion to "targeted killings" addresses the symptoms, not the disease. Myrmidons, in the original Greek mythology, were created from ants. They're cheap and they're easily replaced. Killing one commander, even if he's unarmed, accomplishes more than killing a battalion of cannon fodder.
At the other end of the spectrum lies the baleful prospect of total war against Islam: Lahore, Jeddah, and Khartoum as Dresden, and Mecca and Medina as Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This is the scenario we've been trying to avoid, ever since we realized we were at war with the Si Fan -- or to define them more precisely, the Learned Elders of Islam. That leaves us trying to find the middle ground while the enemy, convinced that the Mahdi is going to pop up as soon as the going gets really tough, tries to push us into the total war of annihilation.
If they're lucky, they won't succeed.
