Posted on 09/06/2007 10:00:41 AM PDT by Tolik
An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians.
Add to the above a huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 percent of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 million to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived.
Recognition, then, of the scale of the pretensions of the Islamist enemy has to precede substantial measures against it. In the matter of Iraq, for instance, the ambiguity of our engagement and the enlarging political cry against it would alter dramatically if one accepted the premises of the Fourth World War so ineluctably spelled out in Podhoretzs little volume, which takes time here and there to demolish such arguments as were mounted in protest against President Bushs mention in his 2003 State of the Union address of yellowcake hunting in Niger.
Those critics who insist that it is only a small war-party faction of the Islamists that we have to fear might have been asked a generation ago if it was not merely a small number of Germans and Russians we were properly exercised about. Sixty million people were dead after that misreckoning.
The difference is a point of history, but in the bigger picture, your conclusion about western civilization is absolutely correct.
I bet we all agree on that.
A big mistake by communist enthusiasts was to declare that Communist heaven is just around the corner. They got carried away, but it was understandable, because the “scientific Marxism/Leninism” had economic advantages of the socialist system over the capitalism as its cornerstone. Fortunately, it is a measurable, verifiable, falsifiable claim. As soon as the Iron Curtain began leaking and the comparing became possible, it became impossible to cover it up for too long. The king had no clothes.
Islam makes no such claims. All rewards are in heaven, and nobody comes back to disprove any claims.
So, while the shear industrial power of Islamism is indeed not as comparable as Germany and Japan and later USSR, the absence of restrains combined with technological advances and openness of the current world makes them a very dangerous enemy.
Norman Podhoretz ...The man who wrote in Partisan Review many many moons ago about Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD :
“The implicit message of On the Road was “Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.”
Was he on crack at the time I wonder ?
Bump. Very true.
No. That was probably the best summation of the hipster and counterculture ever penned.
bttt
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