{"id":294,"date":"2006-06-12T18:24:01","date_gmt":"2006-06-12T23:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=294"},"modified":"2010-07-19T01:49:41","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T06:49:41","slug":"oderint-dum-metuant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=294","title":{"rendered":"Oderint, dum metuant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Nablus, a young man is kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists &mdash; who then <a href='http:\/\/www.jpost.com\/servlet\/Satellite?cid=1149572654519&#038;pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull'>set him free on learning he is an American<\/a> because they don&#8217;t want to end up like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi so recently did.<\/p>\n<p>I am irresistibly reminded of a piece of cynical wisdom from the mouth of the mad Roman emperor Caligula, born of experience in dealing with the barbarians of his day: <em>Oderint, dum metuant:<\/em>  &#8220;Let them hate, so long as they fear&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It is best of all to be loved, of course.  But Islamists will never love the khufr; not even the most self-abasing of the postmodern Left&#8217;s bootlickers can make <em>that<\/em> happen.  The next best thing is that jihadis should crap their pants when they think about the death-from-above consequences of molesting Americans.<\/p>\n<p>I would actually prefer to have them fear molesting &#8220;all civilized people&#8221;, rather than just &#8220;Americans&#8221;.  Unfortunately, I don&#8217;t see the will to instill the required level of fear anywhere but in the U.S., and I don&#8217;t consistently see it here.  Not a single Democrat is willing to talk about <em>making the active enemies of our civilization fear its wrath<\/em>, which is one of several reasons I can no longer consider voting Democrat.<\/p>\n<p>Then there are the practicalities. The U.S. military is implicitly defending all civilized people whenever it waxes a jihadi, but in our world of nation-states it would be a bit much to require it to explicitly retaliate for the death of (say) a Frenchman.<\/p>\n<p>Still&#8230;having even bush-league terrorists fear harming Americans is a good start, and as neat a vindication of George Bush&#8217;s foreign policy and the war in Iraq as anyone could ask for.  The war is not, after all, breeding terrorists; it&#8217;s killing the leaders and frightening the small fry into letting go their victims.<\/p>\n<p>Caligula may have been a mad bastard, but understood the barbarian mind and the stringency necessary to deal with it better than most of today&#8217;s politicians.  Since they will not love us, let them be afraid.  Very, very afraid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Nablus, a young man is kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists &mdash; who then set him free on learning he is an American because they don&#8217;t want to end up like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi so recently did. I am irresistibly reminded of a piece of cynical wisdom from the mouth of the mad Roman emperor Caligula,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=294\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Oderint, dum metuant<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-terror","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2346,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/2346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}