Posted on 09/16/2001 5:56:21 AM PDT by He Rides A White Horse
September 15, 2001
It's apparent, in light of the response to the terrorist attacks, that there are some whose anti-freedom tendencies don't stop at the steps of the Capitol. Some are proposing to turn the United States into a full-blown police state. These are easily detected by their words, and though they must be opposed, at least we'll know them for what they are.
It's equally apparent that the Left and its steel-sheathed cultural relativism won't be pierced by a plinking round like a terrorist mass murder. Perhaps leftists will accede grudgingly to some kind of military action against an identified foe, provided that it not interfere with any anti-American protest marches. But they will not concede that America's culture, the fullest flowering of the ideals of freedom, justice and self-reliance yet to raise its face to the sun, might be in any way superior to the cultures, swaddled in darkness and watered with hatred, that reared and nourished the terrorists and dispatched them against us. Not in our religions, nor in our conception of human rights, nor in our ethic of individual self-sufficiency, nor in our contributions to human happiness and human flourishing. That, surely, would be going too far.
Only other cultures, cultures that celebrate savagery and hatred, can be permitted to make such claims, and as violently as they like.
Why? Even the most reflexively dogmatic cultural relativist can see the symmetries. If A may be tolerated in its claims that it is superior to B, then B must have the reciprocal privilege. But when B is the United States, apparently the principle fails.
Quite obviously, the Left has priorities higher than the maintenance of cultural relativism as a principle. What might they be? What goals might require an unqualified defense of all cultural and ideological attacks on America, coupled to an absolute prohibition of all cultural and ideological defenses by America?
If you're thinking that America, and the American ideals of freedom, justice, and self-reliance, have to be the ultimate targets, you're not alone.
One of the distinguishing marks of this syndrome is the unwillingness to allow anyone to criticize the ideas or ethics that gave rise to the phenomenon of terrorism. This usually translates into a defense of groups such as Hamas, the PLO, or the Taliban, though it might be couched in terms of "tolerance" and "other peoples, other ways." Considering how vociferous leftists have been about "basic human rights," one would think that these horribly repressive groups, which execute apostates, make chattel slaves of women, and preach conversion by the sword, might come in for a bit of their criticism. But this is to assume that leftists use words according to their agreed-upon meanings. When a leftist says "human rights," he means socialism, or at least generous State welfare payments.
The ideas are the target. The ideas of freedom, justice, and individual responsibility are the ultimate foes of the Left. Underneath these is an idea still more fundamental, and still more hated: the idea of an objective reality, whose laws are unaffected by the emissions of opinion mongers or legislatures, and which rules on all ideas in their turn, dispensing to their adherents the results they merit.
The Left's hostility to objective reality could well be rooted in simple vanity. What possible significance can their proclamations have, if the world will not bend to their desires? How can they hold themselves morally above the rest of America -- another exception to their relativism -- if reality keeps repudiating their beliefs and dashing their prescriptions to the ground with its iron laws?
It's one thing to shout down one's political or ideological opponents. It's quite another to scream into the gale.
What leftists don't appreciate is how their caperings and thrustings of their jester's bells into the faces of others has exacerbated the situation we face today. The anger Americans feel at the events of September 11 would not be half so great, had we taken the right attitude toward the cultures of the perpetrators these past sixty years. We would still be horrified, of course. We would still be lit with the desire for justice and vengeance, and we would make them. But we would not feel that our indulgence of these lesser ones, the peoples of the dark, had been our downfall. We would not feel the rage that comes from having had our best and most generous impulses used against us.
"When good is made relative," wrote Ayn Rand, "evil acquires the force of an absolute." And so it is. The evil done to America on September 11 was an absolute. It cannot be justified in any frame of reference. The ideas that spawned the evil are the defining ideas of a particular culture: the radical fundamentalist Islam of the Taliban and the Palestinian irredentists. Those cultures are literally built on the concepts of expansion through fire and sword. Their violence is not a mere chancre upon an otherwise healthy body of belief, as for instance the Spanish Inquisition was upon Christianity. Violence is the beating heart of the radical Islamic worldview.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil," wrote Thoreau, "to one who is striking at the root." But only destroying the root will bring lasting gain. And so the radical Islamic cultures must be destroyed, their leaders executed and their adherents dispersed too widely for the madness to take root in other soil. This is already obvious to Americans whose innate sense of objective reality has not deserted them. The danger of our time is twofold: that in our fury we'll include groups that don't deserve our wrath, and that in our decency and humility we'll omit groups that do. But however the course of events might run, none of the mouthings of the Left will stop the juggernaut now. All they can do is remind us how fundamentally un-American they really are.
Now go disrupt somewhere else.
what, we can't dispute here? get real.
Uh, I didn't write this article.
what, we can't dispute here? get real.
Then it should be a walk in the park for you. Go to it.
um, I'm not the rider on the horse.
Let us know when you want to make some contribution to this thread, instead of your mindless sniping.
The above article describes the society we are about to go to war with. My guess is that women's rights organizations will never criticize it, preferring instead to depict conservatives in this country as the one's who would opress "womens rights."
If you're thinking that America, and the American ideals of freedom, justice, and self-reliance, have to be the ultimate targets, you're not alone.
Not all of our enemies are external.
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