Via
MOMENT OF TRIUMPH
Which war, you ask? Doesn't matter.
Here's what we're up against.
Read it and weep:
Sun Nov 21st, 2004 at 04:06:59 PM PDT (none / 0)#3
DougRichardson (User Info)
I'm curious
"Anonymous contends they will go to any length, not to destroy our secular, democratic way of life, but to deter what they view as specific attacks on their lands, their communities, and their religion.
I'd like to read more about why, if the above is true, they bombed the WTC before we went into Iraq. And I hope the book will explain what those "specific" attacks were that, to them, justified that slaughter.
Card-Carrying Member of The Coalition of The Disgusted
Wha...?
That's not from Free Republic, and it's not from Likudniques Genocidales Foutous, it's from Agonist. So please excuse me while I have a Jane Goodall moment here. I'm going to put on my Pith helmet and try to get some deep structure on
this drooling idiot and his weltanschauung. I mean, I could just go and try to educate the guy. I could also lecture my cat on Cartesian Dualism. Instead, I will write a civilization's obituary via synecdoche.
We're not just caught between two groups of religious fanatics who would gladly get us all killed and find some kind of sick justification in it. That is true, but it's not the whole picture. The Useful Idiots on both sides will each enable their respective Death Cults, and that's what's really going to get us killed.
This idiot, and tens of millions like him, are why Bush will get his war. Any war. Any time. Any place: Not because of 9/11, but
because for most Americans this confrontation began on 9/11, and all the rest is simply beyond them.
They refuse to know our enemy. They are threatened by the facts of our history. They cower in a Made For Tee-Vee Movie of truly bewildering afactuality. They are easy to use. They are letting the rest of us down. All you have to do in order to entitle yourself to young American blood and our Treasury, all you have to do to reduce some unsuspecting part of the world to rubble, is to tell them a silly little story. They'll buy it because they don't know any better, and they'll consign whole nations to the flames because the poor little things are scared. And they're scared, in an irony beyond ironies, because of the consequences of the national security incompetence of the very people who are using their ignorant asses. Sadness upon sadness. A political faction's incompetence has enabled its thanatos, and we all get to pay!
Now, before some idiot (yes, even on this board) accuses me of making Osama's case for him, let me make a comparison. And I'm not making it for the reasons you might think.
What would have been the reaction from most Americans in 1965-6 to the escalation in Vietnam if they hadn't been pig-ignorant about our involvement there in the mid-1940's? Vietnamese allies of the US, Ho Chi Minh reading the Declaration of Independence, later betrayed by the US to appease European empires, driven into China, and the major war planners for the US waiting until the 1990's to realize just exactly what we were fighting. Too late to stop America visiting several 9/11's per day on the civilians of North Vietnam for years on end. That, too, is down the memory hole, if it was ever known at all. The knowledge of the engineers who made our vast technologically sophisticated war machine possible is actually large enough to conceal the utter incapacities of those elected to use it, sad to say. If we were a tiny, powerless nation, we'd be somebody's slaves by now, considering the foolishness of our leadership for so long. But the sovereign, our democracy's citizens, were to blame, too. Instead of recognizing a doomed bailout of a defeated imperial system, Joe Sixpack went in for anti-communism. And if ya wanna see something real funny, just ask Joe Sixpack to define 'communism.' Fit to make you weep.
Know your enemy.
Remember that one? There is no excuse. OK, so jingo-idiot-troll prophylaxis: Osama is a vewy vewy vewy bad man, but not knowing your enemy gets brave men and women killed for nothing while you try to figure it out.
Meanwhile, back in the land of adults, Bush's Useful Idiot has misread the unmitigated disaster of playing straight into the hands of bin Laden as if it were some sort of after-the-fact outrage, and therefore an anomaly to the paradigm he can't grasp (presumably, since he hasn't). This makes Michael Schuer's argument go away, or rather this is where the Useful Idiot hides from anomalies in his own childish paradigm.
This is Values America, folks!
It goes something like this: The events, or rather one event and the apparently unknown 'specific' attacks, are held up as if they are in an sequence opposite to one that could be causal: the Iraqi invasion can not be said to have justified 9/11 because it came later.
Wow. Just, ... wow. Remember when the WSJ wrote about terrorists streaming into Iraq as proof that Bush was right about terrorists in Iraq? Yeah, that kind of stupid.
There have been, in fact, outrages. If you don't know what they are, go read a book or something. History did not start when the towers came down. Terror's likely sympathizers will scream about what's going on in Iraq and Palestine and elsewhere, but their leaders will quietly smile. Osama has his Useful Idiots, and Bush has his.
And, as anyone who hasn't had his head up his ass for the last several years will know, Arab secularists like a certain former Ronald Reagan employee and recipient of billions of American tax dollars, let's call him "Saddam Hussein," were the sworn enemies of gibbering neo-Caliphate types like Osama. For Bush, and people stupid enough to believe him, however, there is only a Good side and an Evil side, so this little detail won't fit in their wittle heads. Remember, we're dealing with people who think that this self-inflicted head-wound is a kind of strength or clear-sightedness, since these people see ignorance as a species of purity and knowledge as a distraction. This is what they mean by "Moral Clarity."
Therefore, there cannot be more than two parties to this confrontation, and all of Them are in league against Us. Osama? Saddam? Same thing. In the real world, they were enemies. Not Ba'athists have gone Jihadists and the sad thing is Bush's Useful Idiots will remain blissfully unaware of this self-fulfilling prophecy and counts its fruits as vindication. Oops! They already have.
Note that I haven't even gotten to the part about the US's filling the power-vacuum left by declining European empires (again, and botching it, again), the basic narrative of the vast laundry-list of outrages in the Muslim mind. This is why people in our own country are dumb enough to think we're pursuing 'Democracy' in the Middle East: they don't know that the US has been systematically thwarting democracy in the Arab world and elsewhere for half a century, and that our best friends are monarchs. If you don't know about this, you can't know our enemy, and you can't know those likely to support our enemy, which means you can only be a Useful Idiot and/or a bullet in Bush's gun, and there's just enough Malthusian in me to take a certain satisfaction in the notion that the worse things get the more likely we are to thin our head of these inferior specimens. Think of it as a silver lining...
The gulf between history and fantasy is the measure of the ignorance of these Useful Idiots, those weakest links in our own democracy that make the present, stumbling stupidity possible. They're not even smart enough to be a Fifth Column.
Note that I haven't even gotten to the part about the invasion of Iraq being planned for ten years before 9/11, or the real geopolitical thinking behind it and how even that cynical plan has gone hopelessly awry. Trying to stave off a crisis, they have precipitated a bigger one.
And here's where I like to talk about positive things we can do, a way out, or at least forward. But I can't.
- You cannot educate and polemicize simultaneously
- You cannot educate on this topic at all without leaving yourself wide open to flanking attacks by Likudniks and bigots, who'll say you're making Saddam's case for him.
- Even those not inclined to jingoism and bigotry are not likely to want to learn enough to win this war, since 9/11 was so traumatic to so many that they'll buy the easy story every time.
In conclusion, I would have to say that this cannot be a clash of civilizations. Most of what constitutes the 'civilizations' involved is simply ahistorical myth, and few are paying attention to the nature of the conflict at all. Instead, it's just a couple of drunks swatting at each other, and they're not even sure who they are.
Update [2004-11-23 15:37:42 by Grand Moff Texan]:
Apparently, I really
pissed off Sean-Paul, or someone pretending to be Sean-Paul, over on Agonist.
Anonymous said...
I don't have a sign-in for blogger comments. But, my name is Sean-Paul and I am the proprietor of The Agonist.
First, I think you owe Doug an apology for calling him an idiot. He's not. He was simply asking a very valid question, trying to educate himself, trying not to be, as you so in-elegantly put it: an idiot.
Second, I do not appreciate the comparison between The Agonist-LGF and the Free Republic.
Yours is a good post, of sorts, but you took one comment made by a reader completely and utterly out of context and wrapped it up in a long shrill screed.
The folks at The Agonist, just like the folks at Daily Kos, are honorable people, fighting against a group of thugs intent on destroying our way of life (and I am not talking about Osama here): why muddy the water between us?
It would have been much easier to find a ridiculous quote by Instapundit or some one else.
With respect, that's not true, and it wasn't the point anyway:
Grand Moff Texan
said...
Doug's statement was self-evidently idiotic. I skimmed through some of his other material and did not detect an ideological commitment that could account for his position, so I chalked it up to stupidity. This is the same point you miss in your last paragraph.
And since I didn't post my admitted 'rant' on your site or address him directly, I don't see where apologies are even relevant. Furthermore, I have already stated the reasons why I did things this way.
Second, I did not compare Agonist to LGF and Free Republic. Read it again. I indicated, quite clearly, that I was aghast to find such tripe on your site. This should indicate to you the high regard I have for your site.
I left Doug with the only context he had provided himself. How is that out of context? I expect people to know who Anonymous is. Beyond that, since I was talking about ignorance, how much remedial material should anyone expect to find? Over time, I have found it more useful to use such people as examples, since confronting them directly is a waste of time.
We may all be on the same side. Then again, we may not. I was ranting against the inertia of ignorance, and I was very specific as to what I think its origins, dynamics, and utilities are. This is a matter of ability, and the lack of it is a problem.
Finally, if I had found a quote from Instapundit, that would have been a different issue, wouldn't it? I don't think you've understood me at all, but then you are a busy guy, IF you are who you say you are.