Lest We Forget….
The coming presidential election is the most important that this country has had since 1940, when we were on the verge of entering World War II.
There will be a lot of talk about “bringing our boys home”, “wrking with our traditional alliesthrough international channels” with wistful comments about Gandhi.
Non-violence only works when there are shared values between the opposing factions. This was true in Ireland, South Africa and the Soviet Union, the three major crises in the recent past that were resolved peacefully.
However when a brother and sister at a German university began demonstrating against the Nazi regime in 1945, they were picked up by the Gestapo, hung naked from a meat-hook and skinned alive, literally. It was called “The White Rose Rebellion”.
No, that is not very nice to think about but it is something that we need to think about because we have had 35 years of delusional thinking about the world.
We have forgotten that there really is such a thing as good and evil (how could people have forgotten Dachau and Buchenwald so soon? Or the gulags of Stalin?) preferring instead to retreat into the childish spirituality of Wayne Dyer, who used to end his fund-raiser show with eryone singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, which ends with the refrain, “Life is but a dream”. Well, it isn’t. By the way, that show has been yanked by PBS,or books like “Everything I Really Needed To Know About Life, I Learned In Kindergarten”. I don’t think so unless there was a chapter about what to do with people who give other people acid baths.
We are in a different kind of war than we have ever fought before against an enemy more ruthless than Hitler.
The Islamic terrorists use the simple direct strategy of terrifying people by breaking every rule of decent human behavior and only acting decently when it is in their interest as with the recent release of some of the hostages they have taken.
Their goal is always the same: to bring down the United State and power for themselves.
We must never forget that or allow ourselves to be seduced by ephemeral promises or illusory hopes.
This is a nasty business and it is not, Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag to the contrary, the result of something we have done. Innocent people and young Americans will die. Let us not shrink from that fact. It is the nature of war.
And the situation is complicated by the fact that this is a new kind of war, one in which
Stukas, U-boats and Panzer divisionsare not necessary to become a major threat; enormous power can be put into something no bigger than a suit-case.
As you cannot negotiate with someone who places no values on their own lives, so you cannot “contain” something that has no definite base. The kamikaze attacks in World War II were ended by the atomic bombing of Japan. There is no such choice in the war against the Islamic terrorists.
They must be fought diplomatically and militarily and both vigorously.
We entered a different world on 9/11. It is not the “comfy-cozy” world of “Just Imagine” and Woodstock. That is gone.
We must deal with this one.
Just remember that when John Kerry, who is on the ropes, tries to appeal to our “feminine side” this Thursday.
