Orson Scott Card: The War of Stories [the story that we must tell to Muslim world]

The Ornery American ^ | August 8, 2004 | Orson Scott Card

[Rocko]

Reference bump.

[Taliesan]

If you do not believe Orson Scott Card (as well as President Bush) that a most basic desire common to all human beings is to have children who grow up and have their own children, what do you propose we do about it?

I offer you the evidence of history, and Card's OWN ARGUMENT, that fantasy ideology can and does overcome "basic desires" for entire swaths of the population and entire generations.

It is empirically unassailable that MANY religious people actually value the next life more than this one, and make life-changing and life-ending decisions based on that belief. I'm not asking you to agree with said belief; I'm asking you to apply Occam's Razor to an observed phenomenon.

Simplest explanation: they believe it. For them, they no longer desire grandchildren; they desire the best end for their children, which, in their view, is martyrdom. Their parental love is intact; their story re-directs that love to an erroneous end.

[Tolik]

I also think that the basic instinct is there for the most part.

It took decades for the World to look another way to allow conditioning of Palestinians (for example) to proceed to the point where they celebrate death. If the West held any help until they stop suicide bombing and did not invent excuses why it may be ok in their case, we would not have a successful tactic of suicide bombing on our hands.

There is a billion and a half of Muslims in the world. Even if only a small percentage is indeed so fanatical as to celebrate the death of their own kids, its still a large number of people. But the most of them... I don't think so.

The real sickness is why they stay quiet. The longer the problem is not confronted by the West and the Muslim world, more people will be successfully brainwashed.

[stockpirate]

>>>al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements<<<

No the roots are found in Islam and we had to fight Muslim terrrorists at the beginnning of our country! "To the shores of Tripoli"

>>>>In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders-often Jews-pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.<<<<

This is just more Socialist propaganda. Our struggle with Muslims is not about these precepts and has no foundation in the leftist BS.

I do not buy any of these statements concerning "Western civilization".

[MizSterious]

Superb article. I'm emailing it to some people who need to read it.

[RebelBanker]

You make a compelling argument, but my question remains: What do you propose we do about it?

[MizSterious]

" I think it is very important to kill Osama (or prove that he is dead already), but it won't be the end of the fight by a long stretch."

You're right. History has shown than a leader like bin Laden can have almost as much power when dead as when alive. And, new leaders also arise.

[Valin]

No the roots are found in Islam

The author never say that. What they do say is there is a link in the thinking of OBL and his gang of thugs between their thinking and 19th century (german) romantic thought.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

the story that we must tell to Muslim world

I vote for: "Look up."

[redgolum]

Perhaps we need another Sheridan, Sherman, or Pershing. Someone who will make the present so horrible, that the fanatics forget about the promises of the afterlife.

Pershing should be studied in detail as he stopped a muslim revolution in the Philippines. He would take captured terrorists to their home villages, kill them, bury them facing west upside down in pig skin, and generally made the Maui Maui realize they had angered the wrong American.

[Restorer]

I do not buy any of these statements concerning "Western civilization".

The authors of this book do not claim that these statements are true, although I think we would all agree that they are all partially true.

The point is that for 200 years the opponents of western civilization have believed them to be true. It isn't really relevant to me whether your beliefs are accurate if you believe them so strongly that you are willing to kill me for them. The relevant factor is the fervency of belief, not its degree of truth.

It is also highly relevant that these exact same criticisms of western civilization are behind the core anger and hatred for it seen among liberals/leftists. Socialism, environmentalism, racism and other "issues" of western civilization are not and never have been the real problem for leftists. The real problem is that they hate our society. The issues are merely a convenient club, which is why when one is discredited (as with Communism) they merely drop that club and pick up another without breaking stride.

IOW, they don't hate America because it isn't socialist, they promote socialism (environmentalism, animal rights, feminism, etc.) because they hate America.

[Taliesan]

What do you propose we do about it?

What we did with the Japanese culture of martyrdom in 1945: kill them till the culture is exhausted.

I don't like that answer, but that is the answer.

[slowhandluke]

So, the problem is that the West's hedonistic story is too realistic to include virgins?

If only they'd been promised 72 women-of-easy-virtue in the after-life, we could've trumped them with a trip to the Bunny Ranch in the here-and-now!

But ultimately, all these self-murdering "heroes" are not martyrs at all, they are victims of the trickery of ambitious, selfish, ruthless men.

That is the story that we must tell, over and over again. And, unlike the vile stories they tell about American motives, this story has the great advantage of being obviously and relentlessly true.

I don't think this story will be good enough. I believe that truth is seldom sufficient to break a really good, (even partially) internally consistent fantasy. The problem here is that their story is that the ambitious, selfish, ruthless men are doing the work of Allah, so their personal attributes do not matter, nor does the individual sacrifice count against the Jihad story.

The communist story was an economic one, to be played out in the here-and-now. We beat them with a better here-and-now story.

The Nazi story was one of supermen, and supermen don't listen to stories from lesser men.

I'm afraid we'll need to tell the Islamic world the same story we told the Nazi's, and like the Nazi's, they won't believe it until our boots are on their necks. And maybe not even then.

I like the analysis, I don't think the proposed story is going to work. But then, I'm not in sales, so what do I know?

[Little Ray]

We have to undermine and destroy their culture and replace it something similar to our own. We did this for Japan, if I am not completely misinterpreting the occupation.

[Lyford]

bump for later

[Tolik]

I don't think you and OSC are in disagreement:

Telling this story is not enough, of course. We must also show that we are relentless in our pursuit of these ruthless enemies of civilization, and that we will allow them no shelter. The combination of our true story and their endless series of defeats will, eventually, be this:

They will no longer be able to persuade young Muslim men to become eunuchs in the service of their ambition.

But military victories without a powerful story ultimately create more recruits to give up their future in service of Osama's ambition.

He said that one is not enough without another. I tend to agree. It's not enough to just destroy those ruthless fanatics. They offer an attractive (for now) alternative to their youngsters. We need to disillusion them that this alternative is attractive by making it painful. But we need to show light in the end of the tunnel as well. The reasons are many, the cynical and pragmatic one is that there are so many of them and our culture won't allow us to kill them all.

[10mm]

It is ruthlessness -- being willing to perform even the most terrible acts in service of a cause or campaign -- that triumphs.

5000 years of recorded history proves that "Peace" cannot be something that is "negotiated"; the losers must beg for it.

"Peace" occurs when one party of a conflict conclusively defeats the second party and imposes it's conditions of surrender. "Peace" is not the absence of war but rather, the result of it.

Any other belief is self-delusion.

[PsyOp]

"O you who believe! Do not take for intimate friends among others than your own people; they [unbelievers] do not fall short of inflicting loss upon you; they love what distresses you; vehement hatred has already appeared from out of their mouths, and what their breasts conceal is greater still...." - Koran, Surah III: 118, "The Family of Imran."

Mohammed, The Mad Poet Quoted....

[happygrl]

Thanks for a very insightful article.

[valkyrieanne]

Have you ever heard of any radical who studied for a degree at, say, Grove City College ???

That's because Grove City doesn't have a highly ranked engineering program, especially at the graduate level.

Islamic terorrists are *not* poorly educated. Many of their leaders are PhD and MS engineers. There are doctors and scientists in their ranks. The vast majority of them have studied in the US - and they don't major in wimmin's studies or English lit, where the real liberal wingnuts hang out. Working on an MD, or a PhD in electrical engineering leaves NO time for campus liberalism.