*Sometimes one of my friends writes a post that he or she can’t put anywhere, not keeping a blog. When I think the post is too good NOT to be seen, I put it up here or on my blog, depending on which one is more appropriate. This one is just such a post by my friend Sanford Begley.*
The War Party
by Sanford Begley
I’ve been listening to both sides since 9/11/01. There is a group of us who want to go to war with Islam, a group who want to ignore it and hope it goes away, and a group who says you can’t war with a religion.
The largest group is obviously the second one. Most people anywhere, any time, just want to be left alone to live their lives. Raise fat healthy babies and sit outside of an evening with a drink and their loved ones. These people are the ones the other two groups are hopeful of converting…not going to happen for the most part. People who want to live and let live only change as they are forced to. This is as true of the Muslim camel herder as it is of the Fundamentalist tobacco farmer.
The unfortunate thing is that this group never gets their way. Throughout history they have either been drafted into wars or had the wars fought on their fields. When the armies destroy your means of livelihood you go to war through lack of options. These are the meek whom the Christian Bible claims will inherit the earth. Most of them will get a six by three piece of it and that is all.
The group that wants to go to war is especially incensed right now. The events of 9/11/12 are to them a declaration of war, and proof that there can be no peace. Most of them acknowledge that it will only work as a war of extermination but losing what they see as a war is not a reasonable option in their eyes. They argue that there are no alternatives since the Fundamentalist extremist faction of Islam is at war with us, whether we will or not, and that the moderate Muslims do not try to prevent or even condemn the actions of their more active faction.
The ones who want to give peace a chance are the most politically and socially ascendent group at present, which is always subject to change. They have only one real argument in their favor. There is, in their opinion, no viable enemy. The RIFs are a minority hiding among their peaceful brethren, and there is no way to cull the sheep from the goats. No one wants to destroy innocent lives, so their thinking has a valid point. Unfortunately that leaves a powerful nation at the hands of a vicious minority that lives to embarrass and damage us. After all, their loudly proclaimed goal is our destruction and enslavement.
There are two points that come to my mind after much study and soul searching. One is that we must fight or lose, if we let them go unchecked they will destroy us from without and within. The more important point is the moral justification for the war party. We must fight or lose against an enemy without borders or a head. To destroy a Bin Laden is to do little to slow the enemy and they are everywhere, from the deserts of the middle east to the streets of Chicago. Their fellow religionists either support or condone them, save for those who live in the second group I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
Those in the second group as I said wish to live in peace and not become involved, and as I said earlier that never happens. The farmer’s fields will be trampled under by the armies fighting over them and the little people are killed by the armies of both sides. This is why they shouldn’t let others think for them, they should take a stand. If they continue as they are the war party will realize that these moderate and peaceful muslims are like their small farmer counterparts in Nazi Germany. Those who die as collateral damage in a war not of their choosing.
For there is no difference between a small farmer in Bavaria feeding the Nazi war machine as a byproduct of his peaceful life, and a small Muslim businessman hiding a terrorist in his mosque.
Comments
16 responses to “The War Party”
Well Sanford you gotta know I’m of the party that this entry is titled after. To me it became a binary solution set a long time ago. Before the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Either they die, or we two. Our two philosophies are diametrically opposed. One way of life would live and let live. The other way is the way of barbarism. You will live by their law and their religion…convert or die or be enslaved. Despite being a war monger as it were; I’d be quite content to live and let live, to leave Islam to stew in it’s own steaming pile of feces and rot. IF I thought they’d STAY there and rot and leave not just America, but the rest of the world alone. They are incapable of it. So..*shrug* Leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. Kick me and I’m going to drive a knife into your gut, open you from ribcage to pelvic bone and set your innards on fire. Then I’m going to burn your house and seed to the ground and sow the earth with salt. Islam has been kicking the western world since before America was ever a gleam in our forefathers eyes. Used to be the world kicked back with a vengeance. Now, thanks to the peace at any price pseudo intellectual crowd, that kind of response is considered “uncivilized” and “unenlightened.” To hell with that.
There was a long discussion on the Bar, sometime in that stretch between the occupation of the US embassy in Iran, and 9/11, about what to do about the level of civilization in the Islamic areas of the world. The theory being that if they got to(or back to) being a modern society, they’d stop acting like barbarians.
But how do you do this?
Our solution was to package tiny TVs preloaded with programs that would teach people what America and Americans were really like. I think “Bay Watch” was mentioned . . . And English language lessons, reading and writing, civics, history of the world, comparative religions, but lots of fun stuff as well. Solar powered. Maybe a scrammbler so they could only pick up what we wanted them to receive. Personally, I think that might be counter productive, but . . .
But you package them with other useful stuff, like food–if that’s a scarce or expensive commodity in the target area, books, pens and pencils, paper, wrap it up in good useful cloth. Because you’re going to air drop _millions_ hundreds of millions of these packets, and you want people to be looking for them. Even if, at first, they try to not use the propaganda machines.
I don’t know if it would help. But it might be one way for the great middle to undermine the two extremes that are going to get them killed, either through raw aggression or by appearing weak and attacting aggression.
Pam,
I always thought pornography was especially useful against Islam.
Defeated By Pornography
Jewish Porn Sweeps The Arab World
In the Islamic world, I think you’d have to slant it toward “Rich guy with four wives, means I’ll die a virgin” to break up that part of the problem. Porn that reinforced submission or domination of women would be contraindicated.
But what steps could be taken to teach women to stop their transmission of the poisonous parts of the religion/culture? I doubt pornography would help them. IIRC, in the original discussion, loaded handguns in the packets were recommended.
I remember that discussion, or one similar. It’s worth trying but, the idiots live here and are immersed in our culture and it doesn’t help. Google Dearborn MI
Yeah, we need to start there. We’re being much too lenient about people bring their own cultures here, and not adapting.
But then we’ve got these Lib, err, Progressives. I think they are your “Can’t go to war with a religion” group, but, IMO, that’s just a false front, a way to keep the middle group confused enough to stick to their “Just leave me alone position.” What the leaders say, and what they really want are different, and they aren’t at all the opposite of the rabid anti-jihadis. They are perfectly ready to embrace violence and war, if that will achieve their purpose.
“there is no way to cull the sheep from the goats”
Actually, we were doing exactly that during the Bush years, in Afghanistan and Iraq. The hated Bush said it would take 20 years, and at the time I thought that was an understatement.
“There is a group of us who want to go to war with Islam, a group who want to ignore it and hope it goes away, and a group who says you can’t war with a religion.”
There is the additional problem that whether we are a democracy or a republic (both of which countenance Muslim citizens and Muslim allies), war with an enemy of such magnitude would require the sort of consensus which is lacking.
Plus there’s the money issue. If there is to be a war against Islam, it could prove unaffordable and unsustainable. Extermination by the billion is beyond our means, morally and financially. Factor in the economics of war, and the question might devolve to a dichotomy along these lines:
– We cannot fight and win and cannot afford another major war.
vs.
– Let’s get the damn thing over with as quickly and cheaply as possible.
So if the enemy keeps up the crap, simple solutions like nuking Mecca will look ever more attractive.
I’d go for biowarfare before I went nuclear. Remember how science follows Science Fiction?
We’re researching ways to use the immune system as a contraceptive, and different research on targeting specific populations by genetic markers. Add them to gether and . . . take your pick of SF novels for how it would all fall out. P.D. James “The Children of Men” comes first to mind.
“Extermination by the billion is beyond our means, morally and financially. ”
Umm, yes to the first, and no to the second. We COULD, within hours of 9/11, have turned the entire Middle East into a lake of glass (with sincere apologies to Israel).
We DO still have that capability. Even if it might be still beyond our moral means now, it may not be if their war continues.
The Libyan people just rose up and kicked the radical militias out. Maybe there is ‘hope and change’ for the little guy. We just have to say enough and then do something about it…The American revolution started with just 10 “tea parties”. It is time to throw one ourselves.
It might be helpful if instead of ‘War Party’ you called it the ‘We Believe ‘Em Party.’ When a man or a Nation voices an objective of the violent destruction of one or more others, then other men have the right to believe it and act accordingly.
But Kathy, even if we assume that the Mideast could be transformed into a lake of glass, is it certain that the area includes a majority of the world’s Muslims? I’m not going to use a calculator, but this table is interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Muslim_population
Worldwide nuclear fallout under such a scenario might make such a move overinclusive, too.
The War Party was a working title,chosen with no thought other than identifying the essay on my pc. I never thought it would get published, nor about the title. Next time I will be a little more thoughtful with the title.
And we don’t need to nuke ’em. Just make them “good injuns”
For some reason, I’m reminded of an editorial cartoon that ran shortly after 9/11/01. It had a bunch of jihadis high-fiving, and one worried looking jihadi reading a book titled something like “From Pearl Harbor To Hiroshima”. The caption had the worried looking one saying, “Hey, guys, have you seen of this one ends?” History has shown that the last thing you want to convince the US of is that you are an implacable foe who poses an existential threat & who will never ever surrender.
My personal preference is both simpler and more complex.
Organization X (say, Al Qaida) declares war against the US or commits an act of terrorism sufficiently egregious to count as an act of war (I’d put 9/11/01 and 9/11/12 in that category). That organization is now officially at war against the USA.
Any nation providing support to that organization is by extension at war against the USA. Any non-national group providing support to that organization, ditto.
US citizens providing support directly or via affiliated organizations are, once links are duly publicized, traitors and go through the justice system as such. Non-citizen resident providing support are spies, and ditto.
Since this was started by an attack against the USA, no nation building or support will be provided after destroying any threat posed by the aggressor nations. If they want funds or assistance rebuilding, they have to publicly and through action repudiate any and all support for the non-government group responsible for the attack.
Getting politicians to stick to this is the difficult part. But after the Saudis, Yemen, Egypt, Syria and a few other locations were flattened, I suspect the extremists in that part of the world would realize that they’re onto a losing game.
I’ll agree Kate, but I doubt it will happen