Nov 09

My Very First Fisk

Ta-daa! In ritual obeisance to the customs of the blogosphere, I now
perform my very first fisking. Of Der Fisk himself, in his 8 Nov 2002 column
“Bush fights for another clean shot in his war”.

“A clean shot” was The Washington Post’s revolting description of the
murder of the al-Qa’ida leaders in Yemen by a US “Predator” unmanned
aircraft. With grovelling approval, the US press used Israel’s own
mendacious description of such murders as a “targeted killing”
— and shame on the BBC for parroting the same words on Wednesday.

One wonders which word in the phrase “targeted killing” Mr. Fisk is
having problems with. Since he avers that the phrase “targeted killing”
is “mendacious”, we can deduce that he believes either the word “killing”
or the word “targeted” to be false descriptions.

We must therefore conclude that in Mr. Fisk’s universe, either (a)
members of al-Qaeda can be reduced to patch of carbonized char without
the event properly qualifying as a “killing”, or (b) the drone
operators weren’t targeting that vehicle at all — they unleashed
a Hellfire on a random patch of the Hadrahamaut that just happened
to have a half-dozen known terrorists moseying through it at at the moment
of impact.

How about a little journalistic freedom here? Like asking why this
important al-Qa’ida leader could not have been arrested. Or tried
before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for
interrogation.

One imagines Mr. Fisk during World War II, exclaiming in horror
because the Allies neglected to capture entire divisions of the Waffen-SS
intact and subject each Aryan superman to individual criminal trials.

Mr. Fisk’s difficulty with grasping the concept of “warfare” and
“enemy combatant” is truly remarkable. Or perhaps not so remarkable,
considering his apparent failure to grasp the terms “targeted” and
“killing”.

Instead, the Americans release a clutch of Guantanamo “suspects”, one
of whom — having been held for 11 months in solitary confinement —
turns out to be around 100 years old and so senile that he can’t
string a sentence together. And this is the “war on terror”?

Yes, Mr. Fisk, it is. It’s a war in which our soldiers gives
individual enemy combatants food, shelter, and medical care for 11
months while their terrorists continue mass-murdering innocent
civilian women and children.

But a “clean shot” is what President Bush appears to want to take at
the United Nations. First, he wants to force it to adopt a resolution
about which the Security Council has the gravest reservations. Then he
warns that he might destroy the UN’s integrity by ignoring it
altogether. In other words, he wants to destroy the UN. Does George
Bush realise that the United States was the prime creator of this
institution, just as it was of the League of Nations under President
Woodrow Wilson?

Interesting that Mr. Fisk should mention the League of Nations. This
would be the same League of Nations that collapsed after 1938 due to its
utter failure to prevent clear-cut aggression by Nazi Germany? One wonders
how Mr. Fisk supposes the U.N. can possibly escape the League’s fate
if it fails to sponsor effective action against a genocidal, murdering tyrant
who has stated for the record that he models himself on Hitler.

I congratulate Mr. Fisk — the phrase “destroy the U.N.’s
integrity”; it is very entertaining. In other news, George Bush is
plotting to destroy Messalina’s chastity, William Jefferson Clinton’s
truthfulness, and Robert Fisk’s grasp on reality.

Supposing that the U.S. was the prime creator of the U.N., and
supposing that was a mistake, is Mr. Fisk proposing that we should not
have the integrity to shoot our own dog?

“Targeted killing” — courtesy of the Bush administration —
is now what the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon can call
“legitimate warfare”. And Vladimir Putin, too. Now the Russians
— I kid thee not, as Captain Queeg said in the Caine Mutiny
— are talking about “targeted killing” in their renewed war on
Chechnya. After the disastrous “rescue” of the Moscow theatre hostages
by the so-called “elite” Russian Alpha Special forces (beware, oh
reader, any rescue by “elite” forces, should you be taken hostage),
Putin is supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught
against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya.

We note for the record that should Mr. Fisk be captured by
terrorists, he would prefer to be rescued by non-elite forces; perhaps
a troop of Girl Scouts waving copies of The Guardian
would satisfy him. I would defer to Mr. Fisk evident belief that “non-elite”
rescuers would increase his chances of surviving the experience, were
it not that I dislike the sight of dying Girl Scouts.

I’m a cynical critic of the US media, but last month Newsweek ran a
brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a
deeply moving account of Russian cruelty in Chechnya, it recounted a
Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers
broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was
a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier
began to rape her. “Hurry up Kolya,” his friend shouted, “while she’s
still warm.”

In other words, Russian soldiers behaved like al-Qaeda terrorists, and
this is a bad thing. Excellent, Mr. Fisk; you appear to be showing some sign
of an actual moral sense here.

Now, I have a question. If you or I was that girl’s husband or lover
or brother or father, would we not be prepared to take hostages in a
Moscow theatre — Even if this meant — as it did —
that, asphyxiated by Russian gas, we would be executed with a bullet
in the head, as the Chechen women hostage-takers were — But no
matter. The “war on terror” means that Kolya and the boys will be back
in action soon, courtesy of Messrs Putin, Bush and Blair.

Ahh. So, Mr. Fisk is taking the position that the Russians’ atrocious
behavior in Chechnya justifies hostage-taking and the cold-blooded murder of
hostages in a Moscow theater. Very interesting.

Let’s follow the logic of just retribution here. If the rape of a dying
girl in Chechnya by Russian soldiers justifies terrorizing and murdering
hostages in a Moscow theater, then what sort of behavior might the murder of
3000 innocent civilians in Manhattan justify?

We gather that Mr. Fisk thinks it does not justify whacking half a
dozen known terrorists, including the organizer of the U.S.S. Cole
bombing, in the Yemeni desert. We conclude that Mr. Fisk concedes the
righteousness of retribution, all right, but values the life of each
al-Qaeda terrorist more than those of five hundred unsuspecting
victims of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Let me quote that very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who
tried to warn the West of Israel’s massive nuclear war technology,
imprisoned for 12 years of solitary confinement — and betrayed,
so it appears, by one Robert Maxwell. In a poem he wrote in
confinement, Vanunu said: “I am the clerk, the technician, the
mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don’t look left or
right, don’t read the text. Don’t look at the whole machine. You are
only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.”

Mr. Fisk apparently believes that Mr. Vanunu had no responsibility
to betray his country’s defensive capabilities in the presence of
enemies bent on its utter destruction. Or did I somehow miss the
incident in which Israel aggressively atom-bombed a neighbor?

Kolya would have understood that. So would the US Air Force officer
“flying” the drone which murdered the al-Qa’ida men in Yemen. So would
the Israeli pilot who bombed an apartment block in Gaza, killing nine
small children as well as well as his Hamas target, an “operation”
— that was the description, for God’s sake — which Ariel
Sharon described as “a great success”.

Mr. Fisk, whose love for legalism and international due process
commends giving al-Qaeda terrorists individual criminal trials, seems
curiously unaware of that portion of the Geneva Convention relating to
the use of non-combatants as human shields.

One wonders if he would be persuaded by the Geneva Convention
language assigning responsibility for these deaths not to Israel, but
to Hamas.

One suspects not. In Mr. Fisk’s universe, it’s clear that there is
one set of rules for Israelis and another for terrorists. Hamas
terrorists committing atrocities are justified by Israeli actions,
while Israelis committing what Mr. Fisk prefers to consider atrocities
are evil and the behavior of Hamas completely irrelevant.

But we know, from Mr. Fisk’s famous report of his beating in Afghanistan,
what his actual rule is: hating Americans justifies anything.

These days, we all believe in “clean shots”. I wish that George Bush
could read history. Not just Britain’s colonial history, in which we
contrived to use gas against the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq in the
1930s. Not just his own country’s support for Saddam Hussein
throughout his war with Iran.

This would be the same Iran that belligerantly and unlawfully seized
the U.S. Embassy in 1979, correct? And held Americans hostage for 120
days, committing an act of war under the international law Mr. Fisk
claims to so scrupulously respect?

It would be entertaining to watch Mr. Fisk argue that Saddam Hussein
was not then fit to be an ally of the U.S. against its enemies, but is now
— after twenty years of atrocities aggressive warfare — such
an upstanding citizen of the international community that we should
stand idly by while he arms himself with nuclear weapons.

The Iranians once produced a devastating book of coloured photographs
of the gas blisters sustained by their soldiers in that war. I looked
at them again this week. If you were these men, you would want to
die. They all did. I wish someone could remind George Bush of the
words of Lawrence of Arabia, that “making war or rebellion is messy,
like eating soup off a knife.”

I wonder if Mr. Fisk can point to any instance in which George Bush ever
stated that he expected the war with al-Qaeda to be “clean”? If I recall
correctly. “clean shot” was the Washington Post’s phrase.

Can Mr. Fisk fail to be aware that the Post’s editorial board is
run by ideological enemies of George Bush, persons who would, outside
of wartime, hew rather closer to Mr. Fisk’s positions than George
Bush’s?

Mr. Fisk, I don’t think any American policymaker doubts that war is hell.
Nor that terrorism is even worse.

And I suppose I would like Americans to remember the arrogance of
colonial power.

We have quite vivid historical memories of the arrogance of Mr. Fisk’s
particular colonial power, in fact. We recall fighting a revolution to
deal with it.

If Mr. Fisk could point out any American colonies in Iraq, or Iran, or
Palestine, or Chechnya, we would be greatly educated.

Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during
the 1956-62 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting only
last month of his prowess at the guillotine. “You must never give the
guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head
around and that’s when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through
his jaw, and you have to use a butcher’s knife to finish it off. It is
an exorbitant power — to kill one’s fellow man.”
So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom.

Ah. Did I miss the part where American were using guillotines as a method
of execution, then?

No, I hope we will not commit war crimes in Iraq — there will be
plenty of them for us to watch — but I would like to think that
the United Nations can restrain George Bush and Vladimir Putin and, I
suppose, Tony Blair. But one thing is sure. Kolya will be with them.

Mr. Fisk’s surety that American troops will while away their time
in Baghdad raping dying Iraqi girls appears to come from the same
eccentric brain circuitry that supposes U.S. to be a “colonial” power and to
be in imminent danger of performing botched executions with guillotines
and butcher knives.

Mr. Fisk neglects an important difference between U.S. soldiers and
al-Qaeda terrorists.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, U.S. soldiers found
guilty of such behavior can be — and, on the rare occasions it
has occurred, frequently have been — court-martialed and shot.
Not that it seems Mr. Fisk would be likely to acknowledge the
existence of this law, or that it is ever applies.

To Mr. Fisk’s inability to grasp the terms “targeted” and “killing”
we may therefore add an inability to grasp the terms “barbarism” and
“civilization”.

Blogspot comments

Oct 20

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 5)

Changes are deliberately not marked. Read the whole thing, this is
a final pre-publication draft. Most of the changes from version 4
are deletions of excess verbiage.

Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from
across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.
Since this process has to close sometime, I’m declaring that there
wuill be at most one pre-publication draft.

I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes,
this work is ©2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution
terms — I’m not especially interested in making money from it, but I
want some artistic control of how it’s used.

However, this may not happen for a week, as I am about to go on
the Linux Lunacy Caribbean cruise.

Brian O’Connell has supplied this excellent button for
JavaScript-aware browsers:
Click to Read

And Erica from Sperari has suppiled a very tasteful static button:
AIM button

These buttons will be included with the final version.


WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to
the aggressors is our only practical instrument
of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of
the anti-idiotarian position:

  1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    hands of terrorists by rogue states;

  2. THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and
    are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but
    against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech
    and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of
    women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the
    qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery,
    slavery, and fanaticism;

  3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

  4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    and shari’a law on the kaffir West;

  5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    underestimated the scope of their future malice even
    without weapons of mass destruction;

  6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found,
    alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea;
    states that are known to have active programs working towards the
    development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the
    terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;

  7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present
    danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known
    efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even
    on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit
    aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the
    Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

RE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind,
to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
the war against terror must be to displace and discredit those
animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
speech, or the right of peacable assembly, or the right to bear
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
surveillance of public areas;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in
both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative
of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive privilege of
force;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members
of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police
cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a
distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well
the ordinary citizen’s right and duty to respond to terrorist
aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible
overthrow of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine
sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass
destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as
the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their
societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
within the moral community of mankind that gives
aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political
agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to
enable and excuse their evil. We shall not flinch from our duty to
confront that evil.

WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to
lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory
and all means necessary — while remaining always mindful that we
must not become what we fight;

WE SHALL REMEMBER that the West’s keenest weapons are reason and the
truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which
terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against
the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted
and hollow, sowing trouble for the future.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not
be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways,
and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the
face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade
Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who
died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless
victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by
terrorism and rogue states:

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			17 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

Oct 18

A request to web artists

I am planning on publishing the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto soon, via
petitiononline.com and possibly other channels. My hope is that
enough bloggers will sign it and talk about it to get the position it
describes some notice in the more blog-friendly of the mainstream
media.

Towards this end, I’m seeking volunteers to design a web button for
the Manifesto. Use your imagination — but I’m thinking a design
using the letters A I M in red, white and blue might be
appropriate.

Blogspot comments

Oct 18

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 4)

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue; changes from 3 to 4 are marked in purple.

Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from
across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.
Since this process has to close sometime, I’m declaring that there
will be at most one more pre-publication draft.

I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes,
this work is ©2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution
terms — I’m not especially interested in making money from it, but I
want some artistic control of how it’s used.


WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is
our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
the anti-idiotarian position:

  1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    hands of terrorists by rogue states;

  2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and by their own culture’s failures;

  3. THAT the terrorists have declared and are
    pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but
    against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech
    and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of
    women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the
    qualities which separate civilized human beings from
    savagery, slavery, and
    fanaticism;

  4. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

  5. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    and shari’a law on the kaffir West;

  6. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    underestimated their future malice even
    without weapons of mass destruction;

  7. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and
    North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working
    towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction
    that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a
    thousandfold;

  8. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present
    danger in combination with them, a danger
    demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use
    of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated
    willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his
    known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and
    elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
surveillance of public areas;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject
the alternative of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive
privilege of force;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members
of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the
distributed threat with a distributed response;
to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the
ordinary citizen’s right and obligation to respond to terrorist
aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of
weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those
nations
until such time as the root causes of terrorism have
been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
within the moral community of mankind that gives
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a
Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious
absolutism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
evil.

WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that
those we delegate to lead pursue the war against terror with an
unflagging will to victory and all means necessary — while
remaining always mindful that in the process of fighting the enemy we
must not stoop to the enemy’s level of contempt for human rights and
dignity, must not become what we fight;

WE SHALL REMEMBER that in this struggle more
than previous conventional wars, the West’s keenest weapons are reason
and the truth; that it is our obligation as citizens to insist on
reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies
from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be
vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our
victories become tainted and hollow, leaving root causes unaddressed
and sowing trouble for the future.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these
challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor
yet by fear of ourselves;

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
wealth and freedoms to win their women and
children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and
virulent ideologies from the face of the
Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade
Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who
died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless
victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by
terrorism and rogue states:

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			17 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

Oct 17

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 3)

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue. I think the changes largely
speak for themselves. I will say that I think some of the criticisms
I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population,
and that for appeal to a wider audience it is necessary to
excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be
completely comfortable with.

I have removed the paragraph about profiling, not out of political
correctness but because I have been presented with good arguments that
profiling is easy for terrorists to game against (and apparently they
have often done so in Israel).

It has been suggested that I should add the heroes of Flight 93 to
the list of those we swear shall not have died in vain. But they
had already achieved that; they saved many lives and provided a
moral example which shall not be forgotten.

Congratulations to the trivia spotters who identified “to be dealt
with as wolves are” as a quote from H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan
of Otherwhen
. Jerry Pournelle did, I believe, quote it in
Prince Of Sparta. I had always assumed Piper
was referring to the Viking sentence of outlawry, in which the outlaw
was declared a “wolf’s head”. Apparently there is a 1703 historical
cite from the US as well.


WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to
the enemy is our only practical instrument of
self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
the anti-idiotarian position:

  1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    hands of terrorists by rogue states;

  2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and Islam’s failures;

  3. THAT the terrorists have declared and are
    pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but
    against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech
    and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of
    women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the
    qualities which separate civilized human beings from bestiality,
    slavery, and fanaticism;

    THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;

  4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    and shari’a law on the kaffir West;

  5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    underestimated their future malice even
    without weapons of mass destruction;

  6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and
    North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working
    towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction
    that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a
    thousandfold;

  7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger
    in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts
    to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his
    own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression
    against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror
    network in Palestine and elsewhere.

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
surveillance of public areas;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject
the alternative of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive
privilege of force.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members
of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the
distributed threat with a distributed response;
to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the
ordinary citizen’s right and obligation to respond to terrorist
aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of
weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those
nations
until such time as the root causes of terrorism have
been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
within the moral community of mankind that gives
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the
Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
wealth and freedoms to win their women and
children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and
virulent ideologies from the face of the
Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade
Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who
died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless
victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by
terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot
comments

Oct 16

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 2)

Substantive changes from version 1 are marked in
red
. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will
say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a
conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal
to a wider audience it is necessary to excoriate the Right a
little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable
with.

Major trivia points to anyone who can identify the source of the
phrase I was quoting in my first draft, the longer form of which reads
“we declare them the enemies of all men, to be dealt with as wolves
are”. And no, a Web search won’t do it.


WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to
the enemy is our only practical instrument of
self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
the anti-idiotarian position:

  1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    hands of terrorists by rogue states;
  2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and Islam’s failures;
  3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
  4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    and shari’a law on the kaffir West;
  5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    underestimated their future malice even
    without weapons of mass destruction
    ;
  6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and
    North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working
    towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction
    that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit atrocities by a
    thousandfold;
  7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger
    through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of
    chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated
    willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and
    his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and
    elsewhere.

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness’ requires us not to notice the
dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our
terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to
both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the
overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the
population.

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject
the alternative of ceding to the world’s barbarians the exclusive
privilege of force.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members
of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the
distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm not merely
airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen’s
right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective
force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and
occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of
terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until
such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from
their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
within the moral community of mankind that gives
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left — the moral blindness that
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the
Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized
ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World
Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those
who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the
nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered
by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

Oct 16

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 1)

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political
categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of
evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist’
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically
descending to almost the same level of religious jihad as our
enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to
the enemy is our only practical instrument of
self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of
the anti-idiotarian position:

  1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death
    perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the
    hands of terrorists by rogue states;
  2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser
    sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and
    a smoldering resentment of the West’s success and Islam’s failures;
  3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or
    concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against
    globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,
    are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
  4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from
    their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam
    and shari’a law on the kaffir West;
  5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use
    civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent
    people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we
    underestimated their future malice;
  6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance
    with rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea; states that are known
    to have active programs working towards the development and delivery
    of weapons that would multiply the terrorists’ ability to commit
    atrocities by a thousandfold;
  7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger
    through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of
    chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated
    willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and
    his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and
    elsewhere.

RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,
to be dealt with as wolves are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause’ of Islamo-fascist terrorism
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam
and not in any significant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy
those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level
surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness’ requires us not to notice and
use the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of
our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to
both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the
overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of
the population.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,
and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members
of the Islamic terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear
blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession
of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of
terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion
within the moral community of mankind that gives
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

ism of the Left — the moral blindness that
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place
than any culture in which jihad, ‘honor killings’, and female genital
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right — whether it manifests as
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian religious chauvinism
and bigotry that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our
self-declared enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in
our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that
evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we
shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our
wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized
ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent culture from
the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World
Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those
who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the
nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered
by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

					Eric S. Raymond
					16 October 2002

					____________________
					(your signature here)

Blogspot comments

Sep 25

Failsafe

I just sent the following letter to the Boston Globe
after reading Elaine Scarry’s excellent piece Failsafe!:


Congratulations on having the bravery to publish Elaine
Scarry’s “Failsafe”. She is right to point out that distributed
threats require distributed countermeasures. She is right to point out
that centralized defense of the U.S. massively failed us. She is
right to point out that the founders of the U.S. envisioned citizens,
not standing armies, as the backbone of the nation’s defense.

After all that argument and build-up, it is only unfortunate
that she stopped short of the logical conclusion: that to prevent
future hijackings, the logical course is to arm the passengers.

The extension to other situations involving crime, terrorism, and
politics (insofar as the three are distinguishable at all) is left
as an exercise for the reader.

Blogspot comments

Sep 19

Imperialists by necessity?

Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can’t live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we’ve done but for what we are.

I wonder if Steve sees what this implies in the longer time horizon, though? The cultures that produced Al-Qaeda, despite swimming in oil wealth that should have made it easy, have failed in all essential ways to join the modern world. They mutilate the genitalia of the female half of their population, they educate only a vanishingly small number of scientists and engineers, and their politics is a perpetual brawl conducted by tribes with flags. Their capability to get with even the 20th century on their own has been tested and found wanting, let alone the 21st.

Steve may well be right that the only solution to a festering boil like Iraq or Saudi Arabia starts with military defeat, Western occupation, and a forced restructuring of society along the lines of what Douglas MacArthur did to the Japanese after 1945.

I used to think we could corrupt Islamism out of existence, make it fat and lazy with cheap consumer goods and seduce it with porn. Maybe that would be the best way to go if we had two generations to solve the problem. But if the likes of Hussein are breeding botulism and about to get his hands on nukes, we’ve run out of time. We can’t afford the soft option if the price of futzing around might be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, or over Tel Aviv.

We must win. And we must impose our will and our culture on the losers, not for old-fashioned reasons like gold or oil or craving conquest, but because the likely alternative is nuclear megadeath, plague in our home cities, and the smell of Sarin in the morning. Is there anyone left who doubts that Saddam Hussein, who nerve-gassed Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands in the 1980s, would use nukes if he had them?

There’s a word for the process of conquering a third-world pesthole and imposing your culture on it. It’s called imperialism.

In the 19th century, the Western powers built empires for prestige and economic advantage. In the 21st century, we may be discovering that we need to get back into the imperialism business as a matter of survival. It may turn out that the 20th century was an interlude doomed to end as cheap transportation made the world smaller and improving weapons technology made large-scale destruction inexpensive even for barbarian thugs like Saddam Hussein.

Envy the British of Sir Richard Burton’s time. They could conquer half the world for simple gain without worrying about the Fuzzy-Wuzzies or the Ndebele aerosol-dropping pasteurella pestis on Knightsbridge. We — and I mean specifically the U.S. now — may have to conquer the Islamic world a second time, simply because the risks of war and the moral hazards of imperialism are less threatening than the prospect of some Allah-crazed Islamofascist detonating a knapsack nuke on the Smithsonian Mall.

I’m not joking about the moral hazards of imperialism, either. They may be a more serious danger to a free society than the short-term exigencies of war. Witness the fact that I, a radical libertarian anarchist for more than twenty years, find myself arguing for a position not all that easy to distinguish from reactionary military expansionism. Urgent survival threats make strange bedfellows. And it is all too plausible that. if we take this path, we might degenerate from imperialists by necessity to imperialists by habit and predilection.

Still. Reality is what it is. If there’s no way short of straight-up imperialism and nation-building all over the Islamic world to prevent a holocaust on American or European soil that would make 9/11 look like a garden party, then that’s what we’re going to have to do — civilize the barbarians at the point of a gun.

There is precedent; the British did a pretty good job of civilizing India and we did a spectacularly effective one on Japan. And the U.S. would be well equipped to do it again; our economy is now so large that we could run a globe-spanning empire from the petty-cash drawer. Seriously. The U.S, a hyperpower so dominant that no imaginable coalition of other nations could defeat it at conventional warfare, spends a ridiculously low percentage of GNP (6%, if I recall correctly) on its military.

Civilizing the barbarians needn’t even be a bloody process if you start the job right after their will has been smashed by a major defeat in war. The U.S. burned essentially every major Japanese city except Kyoto to the ground with incendiaries during World War Two and then atom-bombed two of them. This seemed to help. It would be nice if we didn’t have to get so drastic this time, but it might come to that yet; judging by measures like relative GDP and number of Nobel prizes earned, the Arab/Islamic world is actually further behind the civilization curve than the Japanese were in their militarist phase. They may need to be smashed flatter before a latter-day MacArthur will be able to do anything with them.

Some of my readers will be creaming in horror. Imperialism? Barbarians? How dare I use such language? How dare I argue that the U.S. has the right to commit deliberate cultural genocide?

There’s a big hole in the ground in Manhattan. That’s my argument.

If Pearl Harbor was good enough reason for us to conquer Japan and run it like a proconsulate until the Japanese learned manners, then 9/11 was damn good and sufficient reason for us to do the same number on the Islamists. That meant Afghanistan, it means Iraq, and down the road it may mean Saudi Arabia as well.

History is not over.

Blogspot comments

Jul 03

Winning the War Against Terror

(Final essay of the series.)

In previous essays in this series, I have described
Islam
as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of
violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic
terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden’s
goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment
of a global
Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason
Americans have trouble comprehending
the scope of the threat
, and I have explained why Western-style
diplomacy is next
to useless
in this situation. In this final essay I’ll suggest
paths towards a solution.

In order to win, we must begin with realism about the scope of the
war and the objectives of the enemy. We must realize that although in
theory and theology al-Qaeda is making war on the entire infidel West,
in practice they are only interested in attacking the U.S., the
`hyperpower’ that leads it.

There is no possible gain for al-Qaeda in attacking Europe and
risking a change in the pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian tilt of the EU
(which has just resumed support payments to the Palestinian Authority
despite conclusive evidence that the money is diverted to pay for
massacres of Israeli children). Nor can al-Qaeda gain any leverage by
attacks on the remainder of the world. The theaters of the war will
include the U.S. and terrorist base areas in the Islamic arc
stretching from Morocco through the Maghreb through the Middle East to
Pakistan, and perhaps in Indonesia and the Phillipines as well.

To people who view the entire world through the lens of the Western
tradition, the strategy I will outline is doubtless going to sound
bellicose and regressive. It is not; it is founded on a cold-blooded
realization that Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest
of the Islamic world) regard victory in war as a sign of Allah’s favor
and regard compromise and concession as a sign of weakness.

The war against Islamic terror must be fought on three levels:
homeland defense, military power projection, and cultural subversion.
We must foil terrorist acts; we must imprison or kill the terrorists
who plan and execute them; and we must dry up the pool of potential
recruits before they become terrorists who can only be stopped by
being imprisoned or killed.

Homeland defense includes all those measures designed to make the
attacks on U.S. civilians less likely to succeed. These will include
conventional police and security measures. It must also include a
revival of the role of the unincorporated militia and the armed
citizen. Al-Qaeda has limited resources, but the advantage of
choosing where they will strike; since the police and military cannot
be everywhere, civilians (like the passengers of flight 93) must take
anti-terrorist defense into their own hands.

Military power projection includes direct military action against
terrorist bases and havens. As an anarchist, I would prefer a world
in which private security agencies under contract to insurance
companies pursued al-Qaeda; persons of some other political persuasions
might propose supranational agencies such as the U.N. Unfortunately,
under the current world system there is no alternative to governments
to do this work. The U.S. has begun it in Afghanistan; the war must
continue in Iraq, and it is likely to encompass Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia as well.

The goal of military power projection must be twofold: physical and
psychological. The physical goal must be to destroy the physical
infrastructure of terrorism — the headquarters, bases and training
camps. While this is important, the psychological goal of humiliating
and crushing jihadists is even more important.

Islamic armies and resistance movements are fanatical in attack but
brittle on the defense. When motivated by the conviction that Allah
guides their arm, suicidal bravery is routine.
On the other hand, when the fortunes of a cause decline past a
certain point, Arabs tend to consider the will of Allah to be manifest
and abruptly abandon it. These tendencies form part of the cultural
background that includes even secularized terrorist movements
(such as Yasser Arafat’s al-Fatah) in the Islamic world.

The U.S. was able to exploit this brittleness effectively in
Afghanistan. By moving in overwhelming force when it moved at all,
the U.S. was able to intimidate many warlords affiliated with the
Taliban into switching sides — an important reason the campaign
involved so little actual fighting.

We must repeat this maneuver on a larger scale. We must teach the
Dar-al-Islam to respect and fear the power of the West. We
must not negotiate or offer concessions until it is clear from the
behavior of governments, the umma, and the “Arab street” that the
public will to support jihad has been broken.

Our most important long-term weapon against Islamic terrorism,
however, will be cultural subversion. That is, to break the hold of
the Islamist/jihadist idea on the minds of Muslims. To do this, it
may be necessary to discredit the entirety of Islam; the question
depends on whether any Islamic figure will be clever enough to
construct an interpretation of Islam purged of jihadist tendencies,
and whether that version can propagate and displace the
Sunni-fundamentalist varieties now dominant in the Islamic world.

I can do no better than to quote Michelle Efird, the woman who
inspired my essay
We Are All Jews Now. In private mail afterwards
(quoted with permission) she wrote:

I don’t want to appease them, I don’t want to understand them, I
don’t want to let them reap the benefits of our liberalism while
plotting our destruction. Like most Americans, I would have been more
than happy to let them pretend the last 400 years of progress never
happened, as long as they didn’t force their warped-vision goggles on
anyone else. But since they brought the war to us, let’s pave the
middle east with outlet malls, fast food franchises, and Disney
Mecca. Let’s infect their entire population with personal liberty and
dissension and critical thinking. And if that doesn’t work, let’s
flood them with porn spam.

Osama bin Laden may, in the end, have materialized his own worst
fears. The ideology of jihad has created its mirror and opposite; the
dawning sense that we in the West have the right, the power, and the
duty to wipe bin Laden’s brand of religion from the face of
the earth before it destroys us all.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear has written an

excellent essay
on memes and cultural subversion.

Blogspot comments

Jun 30

Why Diplomacy Is Doomed

(Fourth essay of a series.)

In Mirror, Mirror: Why Americans Don’t Understand the Threat of Jihadism, What al-Qaeda Wants and The Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden’s goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason Americans have trouble comprehending the scope of the threat. Now I’ll explain why diplomacy is not a path toards a solution.

The Western tradition of diplomacy, which originated from the “balance of power” model for coexisting nation-states in Renaissance Europe, stigmatizes the use of arms as an admission of failure and elevates good-faith negotiation as a virtue of the strong. Westerners think of a plurality of nation-states with conflicting interests as the natural and right way of the world, and Western diplomacy is themed around compromise as a way of allowing the members of that plurality to continue in more or less peaceful coexistence.

Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest of the Islamic world) are very different. The Western idea of a plurality of nation-states is considered iniquitous, a sign that men have turned away from Allah. Islam promotes a world united under a single Caliph with absolute authority in both secular and religious matters.

Further, Arabs respect strength in war. Several features of the Islamic worldview — including fatalism and the belief that Allah guides the arm of conquerors — reinforce this. Extending an olive branch or seeking compromise, on the other hand, is read as a sign of weakness, inviting more pressure and more attacks.

Applying the assumptions of Western diplomacy to Islamic-world conflicts, therefore, tends to have perverse results. The utter failure of diplomacy in the Israeli/Palestinan conflict is a perfect example. Yasser Arafat and his followers interpreted every Israeli compromise not as a sign of virtue requiring a reciprocal response, but as a sign that that their terror campaign was working. As the Israelis conceded more and more legitimacy to Palestinian political objectives, the terror
actually intensified in pitch.

The U.S.’s refusal to negotiate with the Taliban for anything less than the unconditional surrender of Osama bin Laden, by contrast, seemed harsh to apostles of the Western diplomatic tradition but was exactly correct in terms of Islamic psychology. Backing a clear, hard-line position with the threat of force actually gave the U.S. a moral advantage it had lacked when our policy was seen as weak and vacillating. The expected furor of the “Arab street” never materialized.

Diplomacy or negotiation are in any case of very limited use in curbing state terrorism and no use in curbing non-state terrorism. For the forseeable future, the U.S.’s capability to project military power into Third World terrorist havens will be so much greater than that of other members of any imaginable coalition of allies that having a military alliance at all will be almost pointless. Diplomacy need therefore be aimed only at preventing military opposition by nearby nation-states.

Third parties who urge `diplomatic’ solutions to problems like Iraqi, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian sponsorship of al-Qaeda should be ignored. In the Islamic cultural context, force and the threat of force stand some chance of obtaining useful results. Talk does not.

(To be continued…)

Blogspot comments

Jun 23

Mirror, Mirror — why Americans Don’t Understand the Threat of Jihadism

(Third in a series.)

In What
al-Qaeda Wants
and the first essay in this series, The
Mirage of Moderate Islam
, I have described Islam as a warlike and
bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist
revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic
duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden’s goal as nothing less
than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global
Islamic theocracy.

I have further explained why it is difficult for anyone living
within the Islamic worldview to reject or argue against these goals.
Jihadism — the belief that Muslims have not merely the right
but the duty to smite the infidel and propagate the Faith by
force — proceeds direct from the Koran and is accepted as a core
religious duty by almost all Muslims.

These are simple truths, readily discernable from reading the words
of the Koran, the study of even an outline of Islamic history, and the
propaganda of Osama bin Laden himself. Yet they are truths that
almost no one in the West is speaking in public, in plain language.
In this essay, I will examine the reasons Americans are not yet
ideologically prepared to fight the war against terror as it must be
fought if we are to win.

First, the U.S. government is telling a Big Lie for diplomatic
reasons. It is trying to sell the idea that Islam is a `religion of
peace’, with al-Qaeda representing only a small fringe of extremists.
Part of this is in order not to be seen attacking the religion of our
Arab allies in the Middle East.

But domestic politics is an even more important motive for this Big
Lie. U.S. policymakers in the know may well fear that if they
described the relationship between terrorism and Islamic doctrine
accurately, the current broad consensus on war policy might collapse
under a hailstorm of accusations of bigotry, prejudice, and
intolerance by the bien pensants who run the national media
and academe. In a political climate where directing extra scrutiny at
young male Middle Eastern air travellers is attacked as unacceptable
`racial profiling’, this fear would be well-grounded.

Second, the academy has failed us. Americans are almost
universally ignorant of Islamic doctrine and history. Most of the few
who have some knowledge of the area cannot connect that knowledge to
current events. The Islamic-studies and Middle Eastern history
establishment completely, utterly failed to anticipate al-Qaeda’s
revival of jihadism, ignored or rationalized the decade of
anti-American terrorist acts that led up to 9/11, and is presently
incapable of supplying any significant analytical help to defeating
the terrorists.

The exact anatomy of this failure is well described in Martin
Kramer’s Ivory Towers On
Sand
. One background problem was a Marxist-influenced tendency to
see political change as all-important and dismiss religious fervor as
a spent force. Another was a reluctance to confront or discuss the
continuing phenomenon of terrorism at all except through the lens of
`post-colonial theory’ that excused it as a legitimate tactic of the
Palestinian or anti-imperialist struggle. Yet a third was the
postmodern belief that objective truth is impossible. In effect, the
Marxist/multiculturalist/postmodernist preoccupations of the
Islamic-studies establishment rendered it incapable of seeing,
thinking, or passing judgment. Confronted by the smoking hole where
the World Trade Center used to be and Osama bin-Laden’s gloating
videos, the academics had no way of connecting their theoretical
abstractions to the brutal facts and nothing to say. Nine months
later, they still doesn’t.

Americans outside of universities have few grounds for smugness,
however. While most of the rest of us have not had our critical
faculties rotted out by Marxism, multiculturalism and postmodernism in
their explicit forms, a lower-grade version of the same infections has
done much to damage our capacity to understand the threat of jihadism.

Americans have always had the odd parochial habit of assuming that,
down deep underneath, everyone is basically like us — sharing
our historically peculiar mix of pragmatism and idealism; valuing
honesty and fair dealing; tolerant, materialistic, freedom-loving,
open-minded, tempting to value comfort and success over ideology. We
reflexively believe that everyone can be reasoned with essentially in
our own terms. Most Americans don’t understand fanaticism and violent
evil. We have a tendency to be `fair’ by assuming that in any dispute
there must be some right and some wrong on both sides. It’s telling
that we use `extreme’ as a political pejorative.

Since at least the end of World War II, this parochialism has
become so acute that it has almost blinded us to serious threats.
While more of the left-liberals who shilled for the Soviets and Mao
Zedong and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot during the Cold War were closet
Communists than is yet publicly admitted, a good many were honest
dupes who simply couldn’t believe that Communists were actually
motivated by the sinister craziness of hard Marxism, and therefore
assumed that America must somehow be at fault. Conservatives
apologizing for unsavory pro-American strongmen mostly weren’t closet
fascists, either; a good many of them had obvious trouble seeing
caudillos as more than cigar-chomping CEOs running a particularly
tough business, and never mind the gold braid and funny hats.

The see-no-evil tendency in American folk psychology created
fertile ground for the rather less benign dogmas of multiculturalism
(“all cultures present ways of living that are equally morally valid”)
and postmodernism (“there is no objective truth”). Originally
constructed by Marxists (and one ex-Fascist) as part of a program to
ideologically disarm the West against the radical evil of Communism,
these dogmas have both outlived their original ends and seeped into
American pop culture. Their effect is that many of us can no longer
bring ourselves to think of any political movement, religion, or
culture as radically evil unless it is safely part of history (and,
for political correctness, was run by dead white European males when
it was alive and kicking).

This was a relatively harmless form of self-delusion between 1992
and 2001, the decade of self-indulgence bracketed by the fall of the
Soviet Empire and 9/11. No longer. We are at war. Western
civilization is under attack by a foe that revels in the wholesale
slaughter of civilians, one that proudly announces its intention to
bring a second Holocaust of fire and blood down upon us all.

If our civilization is to survive, we will need to recover the
moral judgment needed to recognize radical evil, the language in which
to condemn it, and the determination to act.

In a perverse way, al-Qaeda has made this easy. They have murdered
thousands in a single attack on one of our heart cities, they have
attempted to unleash biological weapons on us, and have actively
planned to detonate nuclear/radiological weapons in our population
centers. Those who cannot recognize even this as radical evil
— those who persist in arguing that the 9/11 attack was somehow
justified by something United Fruit did in Guatemala or the Israelis
did in Lebanon — are rapidly dealing themselves out of the game
of deciding how we shall respond.

Having recognized al-Qaeda’s behavior as radically evil, we must
next recognize that its motivating ideology is evil, too. And the
first step there is recognizing that Islam’s apologists are

systematically lying to us
about what they believe and intend.
Outside of a few fringe groups like the Dauri
Bohras
and a tiny minority of intellectual reformers who generally
dare not speak their ideas in their own home countries, there is
simply no constituency in Islam prepared to recognize Western concepts
of peace, tolerance, and pluralism.

We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until
we understand the following things:

  • Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.
  • The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and
    middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon
    the will to profile accordingly.
  • We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances
    against America or the West.
  • Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere
    short of surrender and submission to shari’a law.
  • Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically
    lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who
    they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.

The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that
the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade
Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off
in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda. It is in fact
the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni
fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic
history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.

We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a
barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To
protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam
(purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic
fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers.

This is a problem for Americans; first, because we have been taught
that we that we must not be intolerant of other peoples’ religions;
and second, because fully grasping the nature of the danger Islamic
poses to Western civilization requires thinking uncomfortable
thoughts about the dominant Christian religion of our own culture.

The reader is at this point invited to learn more about the

developing alliance
between Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms.
Then, to learn all about Kissing Hank’s Ass.
Before 9/11, “Kissing Hank’s Ass” was an edgy joke. Today it
demonstrates why ending the threat of religiously-motivated terror will
require us to confront and destroy the fundamentalist/jihadist impulse
not merely in Islam, but also in Christianity and all other
eschatological monotheisms where it finds a natural home.

Christianity, like Islam (and unlike almost all of the other
religions of the world) has violent intolerance of other religions and
the impulse to conversion by the sword wired into its doctrinal DNA.
Most Americans have trouble believing the Koran means what it says
about the duty of jihad because for most Christians, the parallel
Christian duty to smite the infidel is a historical dead letter. But
counterparts of al-Qaeda such as the Christian
Identity Movement
exist in the West, imbued with all of
al-Qaeda’s rage. Christian fundamentalists express the same
hatred of modernity and determination to jam the world back into
a medieval mold that motivates Osama bin Laden.

To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly
distinguish it from ethical self-defense. We must be prepared not
merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in
self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of
thought that make fanatics in the first place — whether they occur in
the other guy’s religion or our own. Islam has declared itself the
immediate adversary of modernity — but more than one world religion
will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in
peace.

(To be continued…)

Blogspot comment

Jun 20

What Al-Qaeda wants

(Second in a series.)

In a The
Mirage of Moderate Islam
, I have described the Koranic roots of
Islamic fanaticism, and observed that Osama bin Laden’s terror war on
the west is part of a recurring pattern of fundamentalist revival
associated with jihad in Islamic history.

In this essay, I’ll get more specific about what Osama bin Laden is
really after. In the process, it will become clear why Arab-world
governments are so frightened of him.

The first thing to understand is that Osama bin Laden is neither
crazy nor stupid. He is a very intelligent, educated, visionary man
who is operating from deep within the Islamic worldview. He’s trying
to do on a global scale what the Ayatollah Khomeini did in Iran in
1979; he’s bucking for the job of Caliph of Islam (“Khalifa” in
Arabic).

The position of Khalifa
has been vacant since the last Padishah Emperor of the Ottoman Empire
was deposed in 1924, when the British and French broke up the Empire
after it picked the wrong side in World War One. Before that, the
Caliph was in theory both the supreme temporal and spiritual ruler
of the Islamic world.

I say “in theory” because the Caliph’s actual authority varied
considerably. In the early centuries of Islam, during the initial
expansionary phase of the Empire, it was absolute — in European
terms, as though Charlemagne or Napoleon were also the Pope. It
tended to decrease over time as the increasing size of the Islamic
empire led to political fragmentation. Independent emirs swore
nominal fealty to the Caliph and accepted his symbolic authority
in religious matters, while otherwise behaving as sovereigns. An
able Caliph backed by strong armies could buck this disintegrative
trend and make the allegiance of the emirs more than nominal. Eventually
emperors of the Ottoman Turks collected this title, and gathered most
of the Islamic world under their sway. But the Ottoman Empire had been in
decline for four centuries by 1924, and the title of Caliph had
become almost meaningless.

One of the signature traits of Islamic revivalism is nostalgia for
the halcyon days of Islamic expansion, when the Caliph was the
undisputed Arm of Allah and there was plenty of plunder and rapine
to go around as the armies of God smote the infidel and claimed
new lands for the Dar-al-Islam.

Here’s where we cue the ominous theme music. It is part of Islamic
tradition that the title of Khalifa may be attained by conquest if the
incumbent is not fulfilling his duties — or if there is no incumbent.
Under shari’a law and hadith, the umma (the consultative assembly of
the elders of Islam) is required to recognize as Khalifa
anyone who is able to fulfill the duties of the position and
demonstrates the sanction of Allah by mobilizing the Dar-al-Islam in
successful jihad. Jihad, here, is interpreted broadly; a war of
consolidation that united a substantial portion of the Dar-al-Islam
under a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy would do it.

In other words, since 1924 the position of Caliph has been waiting
for a Man on Horseback. Or, for you science-fiction fans out there, a
Muad’Dib. The Ayatollah Khomeini could never quite make this nut;
first, because he was not a plausible warlord, and second because he’s
part of the 10% Shi’a minority branch that disputes the Khalifal
succession. The next Caliph, if there is one, will have to belong to
the 90% Sunni majority.

Osama bin Laden has behaved precisely as though he intends to fill
that role. And in doing so, he has frightened the crap out of the
rulers of the Arab world. Because he’s played his religious and
propaganda cards very well in Islamic terms, barring the detail that
he may well be dead and buried under rubble in an Afghan cave.

On 9/11, bin Laden took jihad to the symbolic heart of the West
more effectively than any Islamic ruler has managed since the Siege of
Vienna was broken in 1683. By doing so he caught Arab rulers
(especially the Saudis) in a neat theo-political trap. They have been
encouraging hatred of Israel and the West, and hyping the jihadist
mythology of fundamentalist Islam, as a way of diverting popular anger
that might otherwise focus on their own corrupt and repressive
regimes. But Bin Laden has trumped and beaten them at this game. He
has acted out the Koranic duty of jihad in a way they never dared —
and in doing so, seized the religious high ground.

The sheikhs and ayatollahs now have a dilemma. If they support
jihadism, they must either start a war against the West they know they
cannot win or cede their own legitimacy to the Caliph-claimant who is
leading the jihad. But if they come out against jihad, bin Laden or
his successor can de-legitimitize them simply by pointing to the
Koran. The possibility that the semi-mythical “Arab street” would
revolt behind local Khomeini-equivalents hot to join al-Qaeda’s jihad is
quite real.

Let the last word go to the mentor of Osama bin Laden, Sheik
Abdullah Azzam: “Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah alone is
worshipped by mankind…Jihad and the rifle alone…no negotiations,
no conferences and no dialogue.” The Palestinians are, as usual,
disposable pawns in a larger game. The objective of al-Qaeda’s game
is to follow the Koranic blueprint to its logical conclusion; global
jihad, a second age of conversion by the sword, the destruction of the
West, and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy.

Osama bin Laden himself may be dead now. Unfortunately, this
doesn’t necessarily stop the game, because his body hasn’t been found.
The Twelfth Imam of Shi’a disappeared under mysterious circumstances
in 941CE; persons claiming to be him and calling the faithful to jihad
emerged at intervals for a thousand years afterwards, the most recent
one being the Mahdi who led an anti-British revolt in Egypt in 1899.
If the jihadist tendency in Islam is not confronted and destroyed,
Osama bin Laden could haunt the West for a thousand years.

(To be continued…)

Blogspot comments

Jun 18

The Mirage of Moderate Islam

Diplomatic lies notwithstanding, Islam is anything but a `religion
of peace’. Any honest scholar will tell you that Islam is a religion
of violence, martyrdom, and conversion by the sword. The duty to wage
war for the propagation of the faith is plainly written in the Koran;
Osama bin Laden’s suicide bombers are part of a tradition that springs
from Islam’s warlike origins and has been re-affirmed in every generations
by ghazis, hashishim, and numerous other varieties of holy warrior.

It is the interiorization of `jihad’ as a struggle for self-mastery
that is revisionist and exceptional, one proposed by only a few
Westernized and progressive Muslims and (one senses) not wholeheartedly
believed even by them. A truer window on the nature of Islam is the way
that it divides the Earth into the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam)
and the Dar al-Harb — the House of War, the theater of battle to
be waged with zeal until the infidel is crushed and submits to the
Will of God. The very word, islam, means `submission’.

Conspicuous by their absence are any clear denunciations of
bin-Ladenite terror from the members of the ulama, the loose
collective of elders and theologicians that articulates the Islamic
faith. Such internal criticism as we do hear is muted, equivocal,
often excusing the terrorists immediately after half-heartedly
condemning them. Far more common, though seldom reported in Western
media, are pro-jihadi sermons that denounce America as a land of
devils and praise Al-Qaeda’s mass murderers in one breath with
Palestinian suicide bombers as martyrs assured of a place in
heaven.

There has been some play given in the media lately to the notion
that the ideological force behind Islamic terrorism is not Islam per
se but specifically the puritanical
Wahhabi
sect associated with the House of Saud. Some accounts
trace the rise in terrorism to Wahhabi prosyletization in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and elsewhere. Most versions of this theory have it that
Wahhabism is an unattractive doctrine (by contrast with, say, the Sufi
tradition of the Caucasus or the relaxed syncretic Buddhist-influenced
Islam of Indonesia) but that it wins converts because, with billions
in Saudi oil money behind it, the Wahhabites can afford to field
missionaries and build schools that promulgate the puritan party
line.

The trouble with this theory is that it ignores the history of
Islam and the internal logic of Islamic doctrine. The history of
Islam is a collection of cycles of doctrinal decay followed by
fundamentalist renewal. Believers tend to drift away from strict
Islam, but ever century or two some mad-eyed wanderer will come
screaming out of the desert and haul the faithful back on to the
Narrow Way with a blend of personal charisma, argument and force (the
latter generally administered by some allied warlord who sees political
gain in it).

This drama keeps getting re-enacted because, in general, these
charismatic fundamentalist looney-toons are correct in their
criticism of `soft’ Islam. The Koran, the actions and statements of
the prophet Mohammed, and the witness of the lives of his immediate
followers are pretty clear on what the religious duties of a Muslim
are. Long before the 9/11 attacks, I read large portions of the Koran
(in translation) and more than one history of Islam, because I collect
religions. I learned about the Five Pillars and the hadith (the
traditional sayings of Mohammed) and the ulama.

Moderate Muslims trying to argue against the latest version of
Islamic fundamentalism are in a difficult situation. All the
fundamentalists have to do to support their position is to point at
the Koran, which is much more authoritative in an Islamic context than
the Bible is in most Christian ones. Moderates are reduced to arguing
that the Koran doesn’t really mean what it says, or arguing from
hadith that qualify or contradict the Koranic text. Since the Koran
trumps the hadith, this is generally a losing position.

The grim truth is that Osama bin Laden’s fanatic interpretation
of Islam is Koranically correct. The God of the Koran and Mohammed
truly does demand that idolatry be purged with fire and sword, and
that infidels must be forced either to convert to Islam or (as a
limited exception for Christians and Jews, the “Peoples of the Book”)
live as second-class citizens subject to special taxes and legal
restrictions. The Koran really does endorse suicidal martyrdom and
the indiscriminate killing of infidels for the faith.

(The Koran does not, however, require purdah and the veil; these
are practices the Arab world picked up from Persia after the tenth
century CE. Nor does it require female genital mutilation, which
seems to have been acquired from sub-Saharan Africa.)

For both shallow diplomatic/political reasons and deeper
psychological ones, Westerners have trouble grasping just how
bloody-minded, intolerant, and prone to periodic murderous outbreaks
of fundamentalist zeal Islam actually is. But we must come
to grips with this. If we treat the terror war as a merely
geopolitical conflict, we will be fighting the wrong battle with the
wrong weapons.

It is not merely Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or even Wahhabism we are
fighting, it is a fanatic tendency wired deep into the origins and
doctrine of Islam itself, a tendency of which these movements are
just surface signs. That tendency must be cured or cauterized out.
No lesser victory will do for a world in which means and weapons of mass
destruction grow ever easier for terrorists to acquire.

(To be continued…)

Blogspt comments

Jun 03

We are all Jews now

This afternoon I was reading a quote from a woman who had left a comment on Tim Blair’s weblog. She wrote:

rld, I feel it’s my duty as a woman to wear clingier clothing, flirt more outrageously, have more orgasms, and get on top more often. In short, anything that’s taboo to the islamofascists.”

Boo-yah, sister! This struck me as a wonderful example of what computer hackers and science-fiction fans call a `ha ha only serious’, which is just the the opposite of a `ha ha only kidding’. It’s a wonderfully multi-leveled utterance.

Generally when people start out with “As an X, I feel it’s my duty” one expects the followthrough to be some ennobling exhortation to self-sacrifice and a stiff upper lip. The sheer cheekiness of following instead with “gonna get laid more” is wonderful — I can imagine the sister, with a gleam in her eye and a curl of her lip, daring anybody to call her on it, and daring anybody not to notice that she is one hot chick who knows exactly how to use what she’s got.

An idiot, or a conservative of the ramrod-up-the-ass school, would stop there, take her rhetorical flip-the-bird at islamofascists as more than an excuse for narcissism-tinged self-display or a thin bit of patter, and perhaps splutter with jowly indignation. Me, I got respect for this sister. I think she meant every word she said and was being wicked smart.

The true mindfucking beauty of this quote only becomes apparent when you hold both meanings (the sexual self-display and the the anti-islamofascist flip-the-bird) in your mind at once, and allow each to play off the other in a spirit of intentional irony. Our sister has uttered the perfect sexual battle cry for the islamofascists’ occidentalist nightmare — and I think she knows it.

Since 9/11 it has become easier to notice that Islamic fear and hatred of the West (and of America as its political and cultural hyperpower) is rooted in a hostility to all the freedoms and self-indulgences of urban western civilization — commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, sexual license, scientific pursuits, leisure, personal safety, wealth. Indeed, one of the circumstances that justifies the term “islamofascism” is that this catalog of resentments is exactly that of classical fascism. And the icon of subversive modernity, to all fascists everywhere, has been the Jew — rootless, cosmopolitan, urbane, commercial, and (in anti-Semitic propaganda) sexual seducer of the pure.

Two perceptive commentators (op. cit.) have written “Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Hitler, Japanese agrarian fascists, and of course Islamists all extolled the simple life of the pious peasant, pure at heart, uncorrupted by city pleasures, used to hard work and self-denial, tied to the soil, and obedient to authority. Behind the idyll of rural simplicity lies the desire to control masses of people, but also an old religious rage, which goes back at least as far as the ancient superpower Babylon.”

By saying “fuck me”, the sister is saying a big “fuck you” to all that. She is choosing to embody the whore of Babylon for reasons that mingle her own desire with deliberate defiance of the bearded patriarchs and their stormtroopers. She is acting out the culture war as sexual politics. She is not merely a hedonist or a rebel (though either would be bad enough) but an ultimately enraging combination of the two, conscious blasphemy written with the body under those clinging clothes.

In the fevered mind of any islamofascist, the sister is certainly urban and probably Jewish. In fact, we are all Jews now, every one of us in the West. This is what lies behind the standard-issue Arab-world mutterings about U.S. policy being controlled by Jews and Israelis, and the tremendous wave of pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli solidarity in the U.S. after 9/11. The alliance both we and the Islamists are sensing is more than geopolitical; it’s founded in everybody’s gut-level understanding that rage against the Jews and rage against modernity have become effectively synonymous.

Yes, we’re all Jews now, even blue-eyed Germano-Celtic goyim like me. We are going to be everything the islamofascists fear and hate, and we’re going to glory in it. We’re going to embody all the worst nightmares of those butt-ignorant ragheads in Al-Qaeda. We’re going to kill them, we’re going to subvert their children with MTV, and we’re going to teach their women to wear clingy clothing and say “fuck me” and “fuck you” to men whenever they damn well feel like it.

And, sister? Here’s my ha ha only serious, offered in the same spirit as yours. You are a warrior. I salute you. And if you want to commit exactly the kind of scandalous, adulterous, hedonistic, casual sex best calculated to drive fascists and patriarchs up a wall sometime, I’m your guy. You can be on top.

Jun 01

Arm the Passengers

The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a
possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that
makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in
advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.

Let’s say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots
are armed. Then here are your tactics — you send the pilots a message that
you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes,
until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin. Just to make sure,
you split your gang into an A team and a B team. After the pilots have
thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit. If the pilots
resist, the B team kills more people.

Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed
with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky
marshals (if there are any present; they’re now flying on less than 1%
of planes, and can’t be trained fast enough for that figure to go up
significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A
team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals.
Game over.

Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping
firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe now.
Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly
demonstrated
that the new, improved airport security has had
effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy’s ability to sneak
weapons past checkpoints — it’s still easy. Despite government spin,
there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just
too hard.

For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a
conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance. That’s why the right
solution is to arm the passengers, not just the pilots.

Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns
potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that
flight attendant hostage. You can’t use her to make people give up
weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume
you’re outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on
anyone, because you don’t know who might be packing.

The anti-gun bien pensants of the world wet their pants at
the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed
civilians. They would have you believe that this would be a sure
recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos
blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls.
When you ask why this didn’t happen before 1971 when there were no
firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.

The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang
of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent
bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking
out the terrorists. That would be bad — but, post-9/11, the major
aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives. Instead,
it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass
destruction. Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of
thousands more bystanders on the ground.

And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren’t balloons.
They don’t pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful
of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous;
there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere.
To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting
ammunition like Glaser rounds.

Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious
baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security
guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before
boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster
air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.

Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we’re
not surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for
the reader…

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