Posted on 06/21/2002 6:51:23 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Beyond Terror, By Ralph Peters, Published by Stackpole; 353 pages, $22.95
By Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch Senior Writer
A few years back, Ralph Peters took off the Army uniform he'd worn for a career as an intelligence officer. He wanted the freedom to speak out.In "Beyond Terror," he speaks out, and then some.
The dust cover's pictures hint at the tone of the text. The top picture shows the Pentagon aflame on Sept. 11. The bottom picture shows a very dead Taliban soldier, his dull eyes still open, his mouth agape. Action and reaction -- on the top, a primitive band turning a society's technology against it, on the bottom a technological society killing its enemies the old-fashioned way, on the ground.
And those are just two of the lessons Peters pounds home in "Beyond Terror," a collection of journal articles and op-ed essays loosely linked by a common theme of the modern world vs. the rest of the world, the one inhabited by al-Qaida and its ilk.
A warning: "Beyond Terror" makes for tough reading and is best consumed a chapter at a time. Mind you, Peters writes well; he has produced several well-received thrillers in addition to his nonfiction stuff. But this book tackles large ideas that sweep across centuries and can be dizzying in their scope. And second, Peters tackles these ideas head-on, boom-boom. He refuses to build a lawyerly case for his thoughts by brushing in shadings of nuance. Instead, he wields words as a blunt instrument.
His thoughts run toward a magnificent inconsistency. You'd expect a career military man to take a conservative bent. And one of Peters' consistently conservative themes holds simply that people -- or at least a dangerous number of people -- are no good.
Peters finds in the human soul a bent toward violence, an appetite for blood. That notion will raise eyebrows in liberal arts buildings across America, which bothers Peters not at all. He opens one essay by writing, "A room filled with university professors makes me nostalgic for the Khmer Rouge."
But in other grand themes, he spurns a conservative's love of the past to vote for the future. He's convinced that the United States had built a society so flexible, imaginative, tolerant and open that it is pulling up and away from others more hidebound.
"Populations that make running shoes for populations that design computer networks have won the global economic booby prize," he writes.
And no feminist could be more critical of the misogyny that afflicts so much of the Islamic world. But while feminists call it unjust, Peters calls it economically stupid.
Peters is almost radical in his assaults on the notion of the sanctity of fixed borders. He says that defending a broken system is folly; in some ways, you think he's right, but in others, you think, "My God, this man is tearing up the Treaty of Westphalia!"
Finally, this "conservative" ex-soldier is scathing in his criticism of the Pentagon, which he says is girding to fight wars against mirror-image nation-states. The real enemy, Peters writes, will be an undereducated young man "who has a gun in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and hatred scorching his heart."
Peters also writes of "the trails of slime" left in the Pentagon's corridors by retired generals now lobbying for defense contractors. This man is a moralist, too.
By the way, that crack about intellectuals and the Khmer Rouge does not put Peters in bed with Hermann Goering, who once said, "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my revolver." Goering had no culture. Peters has read and grasped the very ideas he challenges. His depth matches his breadth.
If you're ready for some serious mental exercise, pick up this slender book. But when you sit down to read it, buckle your seat belt.
Good for ol' Hermann.
Who cares if Peters bears up to this reporters' expectations of ideological consistency? As long as he is forthright in explaining the problems as he sees them Peters doesn't need to follow any particular line.
Journalists are such dolts.
The author of this piece makes the same mistake others make. American conservatism differs from classical conservatism; it is not bound by tradition. It is heir to a revolutionary view of the world which, a couple of centuries later, is still rather revolutionary. Liberty, the respect for individual rights, has created "a society so flexible, imaginative, tolerant, and open that it is pulling away from" hidebound, socialist, traditionalist states everywhere.
Huh? Sounds like some bad guys in government were sucessful in programming Peters.
That one line has convinced me to buy and read this book. Priceless.
That is exactly right. The left feels that conservative means a "return to monarchy", "throcracy", or even an "oligarchy", and nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is the left which wants to concentrate power in the hands of the few.
"A room filled with university professors makes me nostalgic for the Khmer Rouge."
Heheheh...I like his style. He's absolutely right too, because left-wing socialist-operative college professors who are indoctrinating our youth into the mold of failed EUropean social collectivism ARE THE ENEMY WITHIN. They will ensure that good old American ingenuity dies out.
I've GOTTA read this book!
A representative of the left recently explained to me that the left defines "conservative" as hidebound Reagan reactionaries" who, ostensibly unable to conform to the changes of the brave new world, insist upon physically turning back the clock World War II era society. For those of you who remember, the great man, Ronald Reagan was criticezed by the left for being SOOO stuck in the '40's and '50's cold war era that he thought it important to bring down the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union once and for all and end a Cold War that the left insisted was already over...
As an aside, the code for the completion of the fist leg of the Invasion of Normandy was "praise the Lord". Bet you wouldn't hear THAT code used in the brave new world of the left.
Well, I guess I AM a "conservative" "Reagan reactionary" then. And DARNED PROUD OF IT. PRAISE THE LORD!
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