What I’m thinking today
Bookworm on May 09 2006 at 8:18 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
It's a "gotta run" kind of morning but, if you go here, you'll see that I'm optimistic about the next generation.
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Hollywood could do worse than to make a film about the 1001 Nights. I read it as a kid and then re-read it about ten years ago. The stories are fascinating and share a universal theme of right and wrong.
A film like that could show Arabs in a positive light.
Well, I went there (Americanthinker) and now I know something about what’s on your mind. Its catchy rhythm reminds me of the latest fad for Knights Templar conspiracy thinking (a la Davinci Code). The difference is that the latter exploits history and the former - your piece - neglects it. Let me explain. You look at Harry Potter and Narnia as a sort of “call to arms” for a battle between the Western World (your good guys) and the Muslim world (your bad guys). With regard to Lewis’ inspiration, you marvel at how prescient he was when, in 1956, “his imagination carried him to a place in which Muslim-like people attack the West and usher in the end of the world.” I get swept up in the patriotic fervor of your message: great English writers have foreseen our impending doom and are sounding the alarm! Let us gird our loins and join together to fight the Evil One (”You Know Who,” aka Osama Bin Laden and his Death Eaters)!
It’s the same with the Knights Templar, of course. Only they represent a legend surrounding a secret order of superhero Christian Knights (I’ve read a book that referred to them as the Navy Seals of the Crusades) that survived from the 11th century AD to today, complete with arcane symbols, the wisdom of the ages, and a network that any corporate exec would die (and kill) for. Oh, and of course, an all-consuming hatred for the Muslim World (after all, that’s what the Crusades were all about).
I’m sure you can see the similarities between your portrayal of two fantasy books and the legend of the Knights Templar. Now let me show you the difference. The Knights Templar story draws, albeit selectively, from a history of the Western World. Those who research this phenomenon, whether as skeptics or true believers, do so by delving into the past and return with a context for the present and future.
Your analysis of Rowling’s and Lewis’ works, on the other hand, is ahistorical. In other words, you - and, unfortunately, most anti-intellectual conservatives - fail to explore or even be curious about how we got here. As a result, you wind up talking about Lewis as if he anticipated Islamic fundamentalism when, instead, being a good Christian, he was waxing nostalgic for the Crusades. Those were the good ol’ days, when men were men, Pope Urban II had a great speech writer, and might made right.
We also can’t ignore the fact that Lewis was writing his book smack dab in the middle of post-WWII triumphalism, when the White Hats beat the Black Hats and all was right with the world.
By neglecting history, we can whip up any fool concoction that pretends to explain what’s going on. We’ll also believe any fool concoction, as long as it agrees with our biases.
I remember Aladdin cartoon. Something about becareful what you wish for . Then there is that one episode about the destruction of Babylon. They take Jasmine and Aladdin back to the past to Babylon and discover why they were discovered, because the destruction of Aladdin’s own Kingdom was dictated to them by that Judgement dude. So in the end, Aladdin’s Kingdom was spared because Jasmine risked her life to save the weakest among them.
Contrast that with Muslim society, where the weak are not protected, they are exploited, killed for sadistic greed, and warped into unthinking drones by terror and despair. The Europeans dare call themselves “socialists”, the Democrats dare call themselves “progressive” when they stand at the threshold of human misery and instead of sacrificing blood, honor, and treasure to fight it, they turn their backs to internal squabbles?
What kind of a person does it take to feel no guilt at the price others pay for their self-glorification? What kind of a person does it take to prioritize internal power struggles and self-promotion with the human frailty we see so often in this world where the strong trample upon the weak?
I wouldn’t know, because you know why? Because the Democrat and Hollywood indoctrination worked on me, and accomplished their primary goal. I do care for the downtrodden, I do care for those who are in the grips of terror and of strong and cruel men, I do care for those living under the bootheel of fascistic militaries. Unfortunately for the Democrats and the progressives and the socialists, I wasn’t as stupid as others. Once 9/11 had clarified the Democratic position so clearly and so unrevocably, I could not turn my backs upon the principles of justice and fairness the Democratic propaganda machine spewed out with every movie, tv show, and example I had learned from. When you see a traitor, you excise him from existence, and thus the same with the Democrats, for they have betrayed the very principles that I learned from them and their ilk.
The education before 9/11 focused on compassion, caring, justice, and fairness. Why Mommy is a Democrat. The education after 9/11 I had to learn myself, because “HOW TO” accomplish justice was never a Democratic staple, and I finally realized why. It’s not a Democratic staple because they lied to me, the US military was not the fascistic bootheel stomping on innocent civilians trying to do their duty and live their lives, the Democrats did not want me to focus on the true inequities and injustices. And when I learned Saddam was torturing and killing people with WMDs, all the Democratic compulsions forced me to be against Saddam. When the Democrats tried to interfere, their traitorous conduct was revealed in full.
9/11 made it easier for people like me to see the truth, it did not guarantee it. Oh no, that didn’t happen until I discovered who had the means to truly accomplish the goals I wanted, truth, justice, fairness, prosperity. As I learned more from military virtues, the non-violence and belief in the cycle of violence taught to me by Democratic popular culture was transmuted into something else.
If the Democrats think George W. Bush betrayed them when they fooled them into supporting Iraq, they don’t even want to know how I feel about them.
I don’t acquire my strength of belief from books like the Order of the Phoenix or movies. I once did, but no longer. I now understand why the Democratic propaganda machine seeks to destroy the character virtues, of honor, duty, sacrifice, honesty, and courage from the face of the human condition. It was in those virtues, whether civilian or military, that taught me the true path to justice and compassion and kindess. The Democrats should not have shown their colors on Iraq. They made a big mistake of over-reaching, on par with Osama’s over-reaching on 9/11. He could have had decades more to build his alliances and terror cells, if only he had not tried to poke the giant in the eye.
Stories like Flight 93, are available for anyone who has been indoctrinated by the Democratic propaganda machine that has been operating for decades, on what things you are required to do and learn if you truly believe in the principles of justice, kindness, compassion, and fairness.
By their fruits you shall know them, by their actions you shall see past their mask. And we have, not only me, but people like Neo-Neocon. Others, who voted for Gore and Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
It is easy to fool Westerners, so very easy, but only when there are no existential threats to reveal the true nature of the human soul. The Democrats revealed their true soul on Iraq, and I will never forget that. Nor will the Iraqis forget.
Your true allies are always discovered in a fight to the death, never forget that. When there are no fights to the death, it is all so easy to deceive yourselves into believing your friends are always loyal and honest with you.
Remember the United Nations? The Democratic party taught me to be kind to the downtrodden, to fight against the oppressors in the Class Warfare to the unbidden end. And who is the one supporting the fascistic dictators supported by the corrupt bureacrats in the UN? Why, the Democrats, oh so amazingly.
Propaganda is good, it is very good at weaving an illusion. But not even the best of illusion can change the fundamental nature of man and the fundamental nature of rock to food.
Mike:
I’m not trying to make a historical analogy. That is, just as I appreciate that the Da Vinci Code is fiction (and poorly written fiction at that), I realize that the books I’m describing are also fiction. I mean, I’m not trying to mail letters or book flights to Hogwarts or Narnia. My point is that, fiction or not, these books have larger messages about appropriate conduct when evil forces are arrayed against us. (And yes, I believe wholeheartedly that we are on the side of good, and that the Islamofascists represent evil. This is black and white to me, without shades of gray.) All of the books/movies I discuss teach children this message using fantasy and allegory. I just noted, almost as an aside, that it’s fascinating that the imaginary world Lewis created 50 years should, coincidentally, have parallels to the real life decisions children are facing now — something that may affect how they process the messages in the fantasy books.
Bookworm:
I understand that you see “Islamofascists” as Evil and Western people as Good. But with that B&W worldview, so much of value is lost.
Your point was to consider literature and movies that prepare our children for the Second Crusade. I agree with you that our kids are being exposed nowadays to media that emphasize the black and white over the gray. The Evil Ones and their minions found in Harry Potter, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings are just plain evil to the core. Interestingly, however, they also are not human (we could argue about wizards vs. muggles, but they are essentially distinct).
In time of war, we must be especially vigilant, not only so that “the enemy” doesn’t ambush us, but, perhaps more importantly, so that we – our children included - don’t fall into a moral trap. When we make our enemies into nonhumans, they are easier to eliminate. They become livestock or monsters.
An elderly gentleman once told me a story that gets to the heart of the matter. He was a child during WWII and, like all the other kids in his neighborhood, he loved to go to the movie theater. Before each movie, the proprietor would show a news reel to bring the audience up to date on the war effort. My friend recalled with great clarity the day in 1945 when he saw a news reel reporting on the bombing of Hiroshima. He was stunned and frightened. After the movie, he went home and told his mom about what he had seen and how terrified he was by the suffering and death the bomb had caused. His mother replied,”Don’t worry honey, Japs don’t feel pain the same way we do.”
I only hope that, in our passion to destroy the Evil Ones in our world today, we aren’t teaching our children to hate and dehumanize in their world tomorrow.
Mike, thanks for the thoughtful reply. The bombing of Hiroshima was the wrong example for me. My mother was a prisoner of war of the Japanese. She was dying at war’s end and, had the war not ended exactly when it did, she would have died. The reason the war ended exactly when it did was because Truman made the decision to drop the bomb. He did so knowing that the Japanese were already losing the war, and he did so to save the estimated 30,000-40,000 lives it would take to defeat Japan in traditional battle on the Island of Japan itself. Truman was able to make this decision, which I have personal reason for thinking was the right one because, in a time of war, he bifurcated his mind — enemy/not enemy. You cannot fight a war effectively if you don’t regard your enemy as, well, an enemy. The moment you start to humanize him, and explain him, and excuse him, you’ve lost. Of course, the opposite of this principle is not to turn Nazi and subject your enemy to horrible tortures or intentionally exterminate him. Doing that is not a way to win a way, only to destroy yourself. The point of the whole exercise of war, though, is to win. The Islamofascists understand this. And until we understand this too, we’re just going to end up in an endless stalemate, where our tremendous advantages in terms of size and weaponry are simply offset by our Oprah-like compassion for the guy who wants to kill us.
Hi Bookworm:
Looks like the Hiroshima example was, on the contrary, the right example for you. I’ve lived long enough to know that I can’t change people’s beliefs. We could argue all day about whether it’s best to dehumanize the enemy and kill them off or keep the enemy human and (for once) unpack the conflict.
I wonder how you define “win.” I suspect you believe in a zero-sum game. Do you think killing Osama is going to stop the war? Will bombing Iran quell the unrest in the Muslim World? Did you think getting rid of Sadam was going to end terrorism? Where is Jerusalem for our new Crusaders? Where is Hiroshima now?
When someone declares his intention to destroy you, yes, I thinking winning is a zero sum game. There’s no room for negotiation in a conflict with someone whose goal is your complete destruction. We are not involved in a mere territorial dispute or a struggle for limited or precious resources. This is a struggle about core issues of being and not being. Indeed, I challenge you to explain to me how we negotiate our way out of the current war Al Qaida thrust upon us on 9/11. To keep it real, I would ask that you keep in mind the fact that Islam’s goal, as stated by the prophet and his followers, is a world that has surrendered completely to Allah, that radical Muslim groups forthrightly state that they want America and Europe completely Islamicized, and that modern Islamists have with regularity slaughtered adherents to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and sects of Islam with which they disagree.
Just to expand further on my position, I will remind you that modern Germany and Japan were both land hungry, people destroying, totalitarian dictatorships. The US defeated those political ideologies completely through a war that envisioned only victory, not some weird compromise that kept those ideologies in power. I suspect that your average decent German would infinitely prefer a post-American Germany (even if he doesn’t like America very much right now), to living in the police state of Nazi Germany. As someone I heard interviewed once said, sometimes you have to excise a little healthy flesh to remove a cancer.
By the way, you should also ask African Americans what they would have thought of a compromise with the South in the 1960s. Perhaps something where people would be slaves for only 15 or 20 years before “ascending” to sharecropper status. That too was a system that didn’t leave room for compromise. And as a total and random aside here, I’ll just add that slavery is endemic in the modern Arab world.
I understand that you see “Islamofascists” as Evil and Western people as Good.
I disagree with Bookworm on the Goodness of Europeans or the French. Some good, most of them sheep. The ratio is a bit lower here in America.
And until we understand this too, we’re just going to end up in an endless stalemate, where our tremendous advantages in terms of size and weaponry are simply offset by our Oprah-like compassion for the guy who wants to kill us.
Israel. Don’t be like Israel, never be like Israel, not unless you wish to sacrifice thousands of your people as Danegeld. (French loved that in WWII)
If Hiroshima was zero sum, Japan wouldn’t be the 3rd or 2nd most powerful global economy at the same time that the US economy is the best in the world.
War is zero sum. There’s one winner, and there’s one loser. It’s not like taxes, where lowering it, allows everyone to win. Wars, however, end. There’s a beginning, and there’s an end. What happens later, is something else.
# Bookworm Says:
May 10th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
When someone declares his intention to destroy you, yes, I thinking winning is a zero sum game. There’s no room for negotiation in a conflict with someone whose goal is your complete destruction. We are not involved in a mere territorial dispute or a struggle for limited or precious resources. This is a struggle about core issues of being and not being. Indeed, I challenge you to explain to me how we negotiate our way out of the current war Al Qaida thrust upon us on 9/11. To keep it real, I would ask that you keep in mind the fact that Islam’s goal, as stated by the prophet and his followers, is a world that has surrendered completely to Allah, that radical Muslim groups forthrightly state that they want America and Europe completely Islamicized, and that modern Islamists have with regularity slaughtered adherents to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and sects of Islam with which they disagree.
Just to expand further on my position, I will remind you that modern Germany and Japan were both land hungry, people destroying, totalitarian dictatorships. The US defeated those political ideologies completely through a war that envisioned only victory, not some weird compromise that kept those ideologies in power. I suspect that your average decent German would infinitely prefer a post-American Germany (even if he doesn’t like America very much right now), to living in the police state of Nazi Germany. As someone I heard interviewed once said, sometimes you have to excise a little healthy flesh to remove a cancer.
By the way, you should also ask African Americans what they would have thought of a compromise with the South in the 1960s. Perhaps something where people would be slaves for only 15 or 20 years before “ascending” to sharecropper status. That too was a system that didn’t leave room for compromise. And as a total and random aside here, I’ll just add that slavery is endemic in the modern Arab world.
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Bookworm, I appreciate your passion and conviction for making a world that is safe and free for all people. As you imply, those are the feelings (among others) that inspired the American Revolution, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Movement, and WWII.
You suggest that I am dangerously idealistic in thinking that war can be avoidable, that treating “the enemy” as a human being is the right path, that there are other solutions besides zero sum games.
In turn, I suggest that you are idealistic as well, but in a way that keeps the wheel of hatred, fear, and war turning for people now and well into our grandchildren’s future. You believe that fighting the good fight against Muslims will be a zero sum game, despite all evidence (Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, etc.) to the contrary. You want this “war on terrorism” to be no different than the wars our ancestors fought against tyrants and, as you put it, “land hungry” dictators. You hope that we can find the perfect place to drop a big bomb, or kill the right terrorist leader, or excise the right flesh, to win the war.
But times have changed, Bookworm. The rules have changed. The old players - the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Hirohitos, the Mussolinis, and the Maos are gone. The old ways of thinking about and dealing with them are obsolete. Granted, GW tried to win one for the Gipper by toppling Saddam, but that’s the exception that proves the rule, isn’t it. We need a new approach.
Osama is a sign of the times; he and his “Islamofascists” are a symptom, not the cancer. The cancer has matasticized, there is no longer a physical tumor you can excise to restore health. (Unless you’re thinking genocide? But I know you’re not.) The cancer is not Islam or the Muslim people. Western foreign policies helped to create the disease and now we’re watching it spread. The tragic thing is, instead of treating it, we’re feeding it.
You introduced the term “compromise,” attributed it to my beliefs, and then sneered at it. It’s interesting how much loathing some people have for that word. Loathing born of fear? But I actually never used the word in any of my postings. Why did you think of it? You obviously equate it with weakness. This is another out-dated way of thinking, but it sure dies hard! The world is much more complicated now, largely because of its staggering population density, declining natural resources, and mind boggling advances in technology.
The answers don’t lie anymore in simplistic solutions like dropping a (now “tactical”) nuclear weapon or working out a compromise. We’re at a Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary in world affairs. Will we choose to react like dinosaurs or, for once, adaptive mammals?
Again, Mike, I think the examples you give prove my point. The reason these cancers have been metastizing is because we haven’t been attacking them. Israel is a perfect case in point. Israel has always had the capacity to destroy the Palestinians militarily. She hasn’t. Instead, she’s chosen to fight a restrained war. You murder Israelis, Israelis plow down a house. Had Israel had the complete victory quickly that she was capable of, she would have lost in the world press, but she would have completely disabled the foul machinery aimed against her. The same holds true for the Jihadist war against us. In 1979, Carter wobbled and waffled and negotiated and begged and apologized, and engaged in failed covert activity. If you call the Jihadists jackals, Carter made sure we looked like a dying carcas. Had we responded with vigor, efficiency and conviction, it’s likely that the jackals would have given up. Indeed, up until Afghanistan, no matter how often the jackals darted up and gnawed at us, we just waved a weary paw and let them get on with their business.
The world hasn’t changed — we’ve changed. We’re embarrassed by American ourself, by what we are, and we’re ashamed to defend ourself.
A common saying regarding Israel is this: If the Palestinians would give up fighting, there would be peace in the Middle East (although maybe not on terms agreeable to the Palestinians); if the Israelis were to give up fighting, everyone of them would be slaughtered and their homes burned. Under those circumstances, there is no room for negotiation. For Israel, at least, it is a zero sum game. And I think, given the pronouncements of Al Qaida and its fellow travelers, they envision that zero sum game for us.
[By the way, Mike, I am so appreciative of how you've kept this debate polite and intellectual. I don't know that we'll ever be able to convince each other here, but I do think that we've perfectly demonstrated the high functioning in a civil society of a true marketplace of ideas.]
Well met, Bookworm! I thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my perspective. I heartily disagree with your analysis of the Israel/Palestine situation - a loaded topic indeed, but I will bow out now and give others a chance to weigh in.
This is not the End of History as Mike thinks. Au contraire. Excuse the French, though.
Putting Hirohito with those other names that Mike named, is a dishonor and a disgrace.
We may need Bush to make a new approach, but that does not mean we need Mke’s approach, however.
Why does mike think bookworm used compromise when mike thinks he never used it? Because, those who believe in the End of History has nothing but compromise to use. THey don’t believe in the tactics and strategies that came before, like mike said those things are over or at least he believes they are over and done with. Mike sees fighting terrorism as feeding it, or whatever analogous actions of the US in this war as feeding it if not specifically fighting terrorism. What else does mike have humanly available to use in his arsenal except compromise? Does he think he has invented a new positive sum game that is not centered around compromise?
The answers don’t lie anymore in simplistic solutions like dropping a (now “tactical”) nuclear weapon or working out a compromise.
Mutually Assured Destruction and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were anything but a simplistic solution. It’s people who believe in the End of History that believe that if you just avoid these simplistic solutions, you’ll have a very simple solution. That’s a difference in philosophy, always and anyways.