Killin’
Cousins
The latest
round of Middle East violence (a darn shame, but made inevitable by the genocidal
policies of Hezbollah and Iran) have shed a bright light on one of the many
things that are wrong with religion-inspired policies in the real world. And
it turns out to be one of those instances of the extremes meeting around back,
a coincidence of opposites. It allows us to see precisely what terrorism and
pacifism have in common. How ostensible ethical enlightenment, by way of decadence,
makes way for fascistic terrorism. They are killin’ cousins.
Come to
think of it, it is less the violence than the calls for peace talks and cease-fires
that point up the irony. Such peace-making is simply inappropriate in the present
situation. (Oh, I am aware it may be over by the time you read this, but that
hardly matters: the same sort of scenario will be coming up again soon enough.)
The very idea of negotiations takes for granted that both sides of the conflict
have worldly goals and that they think pragmatically. The operant idea is that
war is just clumsy diplomacy, and that one can cut to the chase, avoiding all
the violence, by having the two sides sit down and come to some compromise.
But that
is not what is going on in any of the conflicts against Islamofascism. Instead,
the model here is that diplomacy is a sneaky form of war. You are dealing with
insane fanatics, people whose theology reduces them to bestial savages. (Don’t
accuse me of “dehumanizing” the terrorists; they’ve already
done that for us.) Theirs is the politics of the absolute, a Kierkegaardian
nightmare. There is no worldly end to be served. They are just inveterate Jew-haters.
They want to execute Die Endlösung, the Final Solution, by killing all
Jews. This smacks more of apocalypticism than of politics. The Islamofascists
are trying to act out the scenario of the myth-world in the midst of the real
world. They want to bring Armageddon to pass. Nor is this just my inference.
Have you been keeping up with the End-Time rantings of Ahmedinejad of Iran?
He wants to prepare the way for the return of the Mahdi by wiping out Jews.
Armageddon
just might turn around and bite them on the butt, though. Islamic terrorists
appear to be a hydra that multiplies its heads the more quickly the faster one
lops them off. Our decadent Western liberal pundits wring their hands, clutch
their skirts and lament that opposing the terrorists only creates new terrorists
because we are antagonizing them. They are right about this. Where they are
wrong is in the implication that the best course of “action” for
the West, and for the Jews, is to roll over and die. The war in Iraq is indeed
breeding new terrorists, and so, I am sure, is the Israeli incursion into Lebanon.
And there will always be fresh ones to take the place of each one who straps
a dynamite belt on and explodes himself like Daffy Duck in that old cartoon.
The new ones may be younger and younger, leapfrogging the process of maturity,
since they are indoctrinated that it is better to simply go to Paradise right
now. Some of them, however, will be so young they won’t know what to do
with all the virgins awaiting them once they get there.
At any rate,
the whole populations of some Arab societies are gradually being recruited for
an endless barrage against Jews. It matters not that Islamists die in the process
(or as the process). All that matters is that Jews die. Get that? It is better
that Jews die than that Muslims live. That is fanaticism. One cannot deal, negotiate,
with that. One may be so foolish as to think one can, but then one is only surrendering
to the covert war that is diplomacy. Since the Islamofascists have no worldly,
pragmatic aims, what “compromise” could satisfy them? Killing half
the Jews or three quarters? Not even that. They would just use any cease-fire
as a respite to rebuild their strength to attack anew.
And this
is why the apocalyptic demon they have summoned out of Aladdin’s Lamp
may destroy them, too, or even instead. With an enemy like this, indefatigable,
unreasonable, motivated by a hatred for which one is willing to martyr oneself
and one’s new generations, what is the only solution? Israel herself will
be faced with the prospect of the Endlösung: against the Palestinians,
the Lebanese, and any other intractable foe.
And who
could blame Israel for refusing to roll over and die? Tragically, the Liberals
of the West will urge them to. Better that Israel surrender to martyrdom so
the lives of their murderers may be saved. That is what liberals are already
saying, though they may not admit it to themselves. Behold the moral confusion
of the cowardly.
The other
day I heard a radio caller express the optimistic piety of the Liberal Christian.
He cooed to the radio host as to how many of his ilk believed that faith was
a real force for healing in situations such as the Israel-Hezbollah conflict,
and that ceasefires and treaties and the like were the way to go—because
faith says so. Here, I realized, is the same sort of miracle-politics that Hezbollah
trades in. Pragmatic situations, calculable repercussions are all cast aside
in favor of a cherished dogma. And the value of the dogma is one’s fidelity
to it, come what may. The fine print is that one may wind up a martyr for peace
and one may even take others along for the ride, but that will be all right.
As long as one has stuck to the pacifist party line, one has succeeded, no matter
how horrific the consequences.
The religious
peace activists do not expect a bevy of virgins to greet them in heaven. Oh
no, that would be sexist. In fact, it is hard to figure out what they think
their reward will be. On the one hand, if fidelity is their criterion for success,
not worldly results (as Jim Wallace always used to assure us), then it doesn’t
much matter what happens and who dies. We can all congratulate ourselves that
we were Christlike: “What a good boy am I.” On the other hand, if
their faith tells them that God will reward our peace-making with miraculous
success in this world, then we are talking about a superstition little better
than the vehement fanaticism of the Islamofascists. Both alike are practicing
the politics of miracle. A miracle is supposed to be an event dropped by God
into the midst of human history, with nothing leading to it, an interruption
of immanent cause-and-effect. That is why historians can never declare a report
of a miracle to be probable. There is no way to trace something outside of the
sequence of cause and effect. But supernaturalists insist that we believe in
the miracles of the Bible anyway, without real evidence, which is impossible
in the nature of the case. Well, it is the same with miracle politics. One hopes
and prays and believes for a peace which passes understanding, a peace that
only God could impose, one that does not proceed from the hanging threads of
human policy or compromise, a peace that would have to consist of a new creation
in a circumscribed piece of geography, an embassy of the imagined coming millennium.
The liberal
Christian peace-maker accuses George W. Bush of barreling through the china
shop of geo-politics using his evangelical faith as a road-map to and through
Armageddon. But they are only engaging in projection. Bush is a conventionally
religious Methodist, a member of a Twelve-Step denomination with no theology
at all. He is no Pat Robertson, a nut easily as delusional as Ahmedinejad, and
Robertson is not in power. Success or failure, Bush is a pragmatic politician.
His vision is one of a democratic and capitalist Middle East, something religion
says nothing about. It is his left-wing pacifist critics who are slaves of a
dangerous strain of heedless fanaticism.
So both
leftist Christians and Islamofascist savages have left worldly considerations
behind. Both are dangerous. The Muslim fanatics are of more immediate danger,
but the Christian fanatics are purveyors of a more subtle poison, one that actually
plays in tandem with the Muslims. At least it may be said of the Islamists that
they have a robust courage, a will to power. Too bad it is a nihilistic berserker
rage, leading the world back to the Dark Ages. The Christian peacenik’s
is the cringing slave-morality that dignifies suicide as martyrdom, surrender
as peace, appeasement as diplomacy. Beneath the veneer of self-proclaimed moral
heroism there festers a moral rot, a failure of nerve. The Muslim hater of the
West at least has the wolf’s sharp sense of smell: he can smell the rot
of the liberal West and sees it an easy, impotent victim. The rest of us must
steel ourselves to reject with contempt the whining of effete Christian liberalism
if we are to draw upon the reserves of our heroic American heritage to withstand
the terror-mongering Arabs as we once did their predecessors the Nazis.
So says
Zarathustra.
